
Class F JXS 
Book 


PRESENTED RY 





HE 
IDEA OF PERSONALITY 



DISSERTATION 

Submitted to the Faculty of Sacred Sciences of the Catholic 

University of America in partial fulfilment of the 

requirements for the Doctorate in Theology. 



By the 

Rev. Timothy B. Moroney, S. T. X. 

Society of St. Joseph for Colored Missions. 



Catholic University of America. 

Washington, D. C. 

MCMXIX. 



THE 
IDEA OF PERSONALITY 




DISSERTATION 

Submitted to the Faculty of Sacred Sciences of the Catholic 

University of America in pa/rtial fulfilment of the 

requirements for the Doctorate in Theology. 



By the 

Rev. Timothy B. Moroney_, S. T. L. 

Society of St. Joseph for Colored Missions. 



Catholic University of America. 

Washington, D. C. 

MCMXIX. 



NIHIL OB STAT 



IMPRIMATUR 






Thomas J. Shahan, S. T. D., 

Censor Deputatus. 



J. Card. Gibbons, 

Archiepiscopus Baltimorensis. 



MP » KIP 



■ *■ 



Printed by 

0' Donovan Bros. 

BALTIMORE, MD. 



1n3 



UNIVERSITAS CATHOLICA AMERICAE, Washingtonii 

S. FACULTAS THEOLOGICA, 1918-1919. 

No. 13. 



CONTENTS. 



Page. 

INTRODUCTION I 

CHAPTER I— The Christian Origin of the Idea of Personality. . 1 
CHAPTER II— The Scholastic Development of the Idea of Per- 
sonality 21 

CHAPTER III— The Physical Person 31 

CHAPTER IV— The Psychological Person. 41 

CHAPTER V— Religious Personality 57 

CHAPTER VI— Ethical Personality 67 

CHAPTER VII— Personality in Sociological Theory 87 

CHAPTER VIII— Personality in Political Theory 95 

CHAPTER IX— Personality in Economic Theory 107 

CONCLUSION 123 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 127 



INTRODUCTION 

Not since the French Revolution have the masses of 
men had such a passionate trust in the power of ideas as 
they have today. Such ideas as society, state, person, are 
no longer the exclusive concern of the few favored experts 
in philosophy and political theory. Such other ideas as au- 
thority, responsibility, conscience, right, and freedom, have 
become more than the mere blunted foils of friendly, aca- 
demic discussion. 

This democratization of ideas has been, on the whole, 
a healthy stimulant. No one who recalls the riotous con- 
fusion of thought in the nineteenth century will regret a 
situation that seems to promise a period of redefinition. 
One does not have to be an obscurantist to regret the un- 
controlled and, often uncritical way, in which the findings 
of physical science were applied in the fields of ethics, re- 
ligion, politics, sociology, economics, and history. We 
should have been warned that speculation was moving too 
rapidly. The careful scientist rarely makes a sweeping 
and definite conclusion. More rarely still does he make a 
universal application of deductions, reached in his own 
sphere of investigation, to all branches of knowledge. 

If the philosophy of life, built upon the recent biologi- 
cal and sociological premises, has been unsatisfactory, this 
has been due to an apparent unwillingness to take the time 
required to distinguish what is of permanent value from 
what is simply the exaggeration of controversy, in the 
anxiety to establish a theory. It is conceivable that men 
should wish, under the impulse of fresh evidence, to re-ex- 
amine their notions of God, the nature of human progress, 
society, and free-will ; but it is not conceivable that conclu- 
sions, reached so rapidly and with so little discrimination 
between fact and hypothesis, should be always accurate and 
should really reflect life's problems and complexities. 

"We need to be redeemed from our own overweening 
confidence. "We must have an antidote to the theologian 
wiho sees no hope for ethical Christianity unless it be ex- 



II 

plained in harmony with the current social theories ; to the 
sociologist who assures us casually, as he might remark on 
the state of the weather, that the urging of the moral obli- 
gation is "no more than the impulse to eat"; to the popu- 
lar scientist who explains the world on a basis of a half-de- 
veloped monistic philosophy. Even the most robust radical 
must admit that such generalizations are out of place. 

Some day we shall witness a sane and impartial move- 
ment to consolidate the real gains that have been made dur- 
ing the past half-century of feverish study. So far the task 
has been left to novelists, as Mr. Wells and Mr. George Ber- 
nard Shaw. These writers mean well, no doubt, but the 
absoluteness with which they put forth their fanciful theo- 
ries is distasteful to one who knows that there is nothing so 
absolute as claimed, in the domain of sense-experience, even 
in such an apparently simple experiment as the decomposi- 
tion of water. On the other hand, the true worth of a book 
like Professor Simon Patten's "The Social Basis of Reli- 
gion" lies not at all in the solutions which it proposes. 
These are open to mortal criticism. Its value lies in the 
recognition that the interests of Society and Religion are 
solidary, not the disconnected things which the mathema- 
tical method of Descartes made them in modern thought. 

We have had our era of criticism and romanticism. The 
work of reconstruction must be begun ; and for the task, a 
dictionary will be of more value than a hand-book of experi- 
ments. 

It is obvious that this reconstruction will bring many 
changes of attitude. For one thing, personality will be con- 
ceded more significance. The spirit that dictated a reaction 
against the total subjectivism of later Kantians, in philoso- 
phy, and the " uncriticized individualism" of Herbert Spen- 
cer, in political theory, was justified, but it evidently went 
too far. There are already signs of readjustment. The 
certain evidences for this re-awakening cannot, indeed, be 
seen in the utterances of such prophets as Mr. Gilbert Can- 
nan who, no longer ago than last year, protested against a 
State that suppressed the individual will, conscience, and 
responsibility. 1 Personality has always had its prophets. 

1 Freedom, London. 



Ill 

There have been in every age men who asserted in bitter, 
eloquent anger the dignity of the individual spirit against 
the pretenses of institutions. Such, in ancient times, were 
the Cynics, the Sophists, and the Stoics. Such, in the Chris- 
tian era, were Tertuillian, Ambrose, and Innocent IV, and 
all that noble list that the world remembers as the defend- 
ers of the weak, the leaders of the oppressed, and the cham- 
pions of the rights of the minority. 

When, however, the President of the Philosophical As- 
sociation; 1 when Mr. Cole in the interests of economics;, 2 
when Professor James Ward as the spokesman of social 
eugenics 3 — when these and others of equal authority urge 
that the center of importance must be referred back to the 
individual, those of us who care to read the signs of the 
times know that the winter of discontent is at hand — dis- 
content with the former tendencies that, in all branches of 
investigation, were destroying the spirit and substance 
of man, and driving the individual into the exclusive ser- 
vice of his environment. 

It is true that we have still many lessons to relearn. We 
must lose the naive conviction that the idea of personality 
belongs to a crude and undeveloped mental equipment, and 
that individualism in social and moral life is a relic of a 
backward civilization. We must estimate properly the im- 
portance which a growing self-consciousness has always 
had in the world's work. Personality is not a force the 
influence of which can be demonstrated mathematically, but 
it should not be set aside in favor of a conception that 
progress moves in large sections with but little regard to the 
m^nds and wills of those composing the section. 

Looking back over the civilizations that have stood out 
prominently, the features that, by almost universal consent 
of historians, have been actual contributions to progress 
were all inspired by the dim perception of a worth in each 
man beyond the aims and purposes of the common life and 
by the desire to have this worth recognized among ever- 

x The Opportunity of Philosophy, Philos. Rev., Vol. XXVII No. 2, March, 
1918. 

2 Self -Government in Industry, London, 1918. 

3 Personality, the Final Aim of Social Eugenics, Hiolert Journal, July, 1917. 



IV 

widening spheres of individuals. The philosophy of Plato 
and Aristotle is now recalled for nothing so much as for 
the solid efforts to give a more spiritual foundation to the 
nature of man. The Eomans never did anything compar- 
able to the creation of the noble body of private law in which 
for the first time in ancient thought the individual was res- 
cued from the State. In fact, the administration of the Em- 
pire was all along a brilliant attempt at a compromise be- 
tween the sovereignty of the individual and the sovereignty 
of the State. With the preaching of Christianity came a 
profounder resolution in human life. Henceforth, each 
man, no matter what his condition or circumstances, tried 
to place his life on a self-sufficient basis, above the contin- 
gencies of environment. 

The belief that the test of possible achievement, human- 
ly speaking, is one's own mind and will; that the test of 
actual achievement is one's own conscience, has brought 
happiness to millions. Even in modern times the great ris- 
ing of labor has been due quite as much to ideas of right, 
with reference to personal interests that no system or or- 
ganization can ethically ignore, as to changes in the eco- 
nomic situation. 

As regards the realization in practice, indeed, of what 
was seen to be good, there was frequently much contradic- 
tion. The Greek philosophers seem totally unaware of the 
ethical possibilities of their philosophy when they discuss 
political theory. The liberalizing tendency of Eoman law 
is almost entirely checked by the fear of leaving the written 
word of the statute books. Christianity was in constant 
danger of being stifled by social beliefs and customs, which 
took shape in the political expedients of governments and 
the prejudices of the mass of the population. The workers 
of our own age are still in the grip of an industrial scheme 
that makes but little attempt to conciliate their mind and 
spirit. But each succeeding civilization has taken for grant- 
ed that the great problems of principle have been solved, 
and this attitude has prevented a return to conditions where 
life was on a dead level ; where the accepted status was re- 
garded as unalterable and final; where, consequently, fur- 
ther progress would have been impossible. 



It will be hard for us to relinquish our habit of setting 
aside causes that do not admit of analysis in the accepted 
way. But the past few years have made us less mechanical 
and more human. At any rate, it is not so much of a chal- 
lenge now, as it would have been formerly, to affirm that 
human life and human progress need for thejlr explanation 
the supposition that man is an independent subject of right, 
life, and destiny. 

An effort will be made here to restate the Scholastic 
definition of personality in terms of values. Those of us who 
accept Scholasticism can do so for only one reason — that it 
reflects more truly, in our view, than any other system, the 
real conditions of life; that it supplies the best answers to 
the needs of our questioning minds; and that it contains, 
in germ at least, the most promising opportunity of finding 
truth amid changing mental equipment and increasing 
knowledge. To keep alive this motive it is not enough to 
have definitions. We must retranslate the definitions into 
the large tracts of vivid, pulsating experience, of which the 
definitions originally were but crystallizations. When St. 
Thomas lectured on liberty, for example, he did so in an at- 
mosphere charged with the struggles of the Papacy and the 
Empire, and with no end of debate on such notions as con- 
science, morality, might, expediency, taxation, and represen- 
tative government. As late as the seventeenth century, 
those who heard Suarez could remember that his views on 
the State were formed in such practical situations as urged 
the theologian to quarrel with an English king. We must 
receive our intellectual inheritance and put into it the ele- 
ment of vitality that the Scholastics could not transmit. 1 

The plan of this study, accordingly, does not call for an 
extensive discussion of substance, nature, essence, existence, 
the constituents of the metaphysical definition of person- 
ality. It rather demands the treatment of the practical pos- 
tulates upon which the metaphysical definition is founded. 
Much misconception has been due to the opinion that the 



1 Some illuminating thought can be found in the section on "The New 
Scholasticism and Modern Sciences" in M. de Wulf s Scholasticism, Old 
and New, Eng., Tr., N. Y., 1910, p. 200. 



VI 

idea of personality has been a mental convention, just as 
" person" is said to have been a legal fiction with Roman 
jurists. 

William James once wrote : ' ' Why is the being-an-indi- 
vidual in some inaccessible metaphysical way so much 
prouder an achievement?" 1 That was a good sentence and 
the professor knew it. He meant it to be a clinching argu- 
ment against the necessity of admitting a substantial soul 
in order to preserve the "closed individuality of each per- 
sonal consciousness." No man could fashion a thoroughly 
satisfactory answer, with merely metaphysical tools, to Pro- 
fessor James' embarrassing question. 

But metaphysical personality was not conceived merely 
to guarantee man's dignity or to prove that man is the over- 
lord of nature. It is simply the summing up of a number of 
elements observable in the various spheres of life; in the 
psychical life, where personality means the unity, perma- 
nence, and identity of individual ; in the religious life, where 
it recognizes the need of assimilating the human to the 
Divine ; in the political life, where it is equivalent to free- 
dom and the untransmissible responsibility for all moral 
decisions ; in the social life, where it denotes the incommuni- 
cable basis which social forces, psychical and physical, in- 
fluence and alter but never destroy. Of course, the right to 
interpret these various characteristics and activities in 
terms of personality may be disputed, is very much disputed 
at present. This is not the point. The point is that the 
idea of personality, far from being a simple logical expe- 
dient, is the result of a very definite, and a thoroughly con- 
crete conception of life and progress. 

Some mention, however, should be made of the nature 
of the evidence responsible for the belief in personality. 
First place must be conceded to religious facts. Personal- 
ity has been an inevitable idea in the history of religions. 
"Religious progress," wrote Mr. Jevons, "moves wholly on 
one line, that of personality." This is verified in the "per- 
sonal-soul concept" of primitive peoples and in their con- 
ception of the deities as eminently living, acting, and think- 
ing like themselves, with whom they could come into con- 

1 Psychology, New York, 1890, Vol. I, p. 350. 



VII 

tact, with whom they could treat even as they did among 
themselves. It is seen in a higher and purer way in the 
free-will relation between the Stoics and God. It is ob- 
served, highest of all, in the personal God of the Christians 
and in the explanations of man's nature in harmony with 
that conception of God. 

Several problems present themselves. May we, for in- 
stance, give to religious evidence the same significance and 
importance that we attach to other kinds of evidence? 
There is no apparent reason why the religious thinker, even 
among uncultured races, may not trust his intuitions with 
regard to personality, just as the chemist trusts his intui- 
tions with regard to matter, and the psychologist his intui- 
tions with regard to mind. He is in no worse position than 
the natural scientist, for fundamentally the chief instrument 
of both is a knowledge of cause-and-effect relations. 

A more serious consideration concerns the value to be 
placed on religious evidence. Is religion essential to the 
progress of individuals and societies, or is it, as Professor 
Giddings catalogues it, a minor side of life that appears and 
develops only "when there is enough energy in society left 
over from the main struggle for existence 1 ?" 1 The effects 
of the latter assertion on ideas which, like personality, de- 
pend mainly for their stability on the essential nature of 
religious facts, are only too obvious. But, by what norms 
do wie judge that industrial, legal, and political traditions 
are primary in the social structure and that religious and 
aesthetic traditions are secondary! Is the division actually 
discernible in the order of things and in the successive 
epochs of history? Or is it not rather a subjective disposi- 
tion of the data which we ourselves make? This would 
seem to be the case, especially when we advert to the various 
kinds of elements that have all been declared fundamental. 
M. Eibot selects the physiological, Karl Marx and Professor 
Simon Patten choose the economic, while the bulk of the un- 
enlightened populace prefer the religious. If the matter 
were capable of so easy a solution, there should not be so 
large an amount of disagreement. But just as there is no 
known way of absolutely convincing a man that his interests 

1 Principles of Sociology, New York, 1908, p. 307. 



VIII 

lie in religious, rather than in economic and political paths, 
so is there no known way of determining — unless we decide 
beforehand the kind of life and progress, we desire — what 
elements of life are really essential to progress, and what 
elements are merely accidental, contributory factors. It is 
much more sensible to regard all as essential, and none as 
negligible. 

It will be clear from what has just been said that the 
concern of the theologian in the problem of personality must 
always be very natural and very deep. There is no aspect 
of the problem in any field of investigation that he can 
afford to overlook. And this, not merely because our idea 
of personality has its roots in the theological thought of 
the early Christian centuries, but also because the notion of 
man, his nature, his aims, his destiny, is inseparable from 
the notion of God. These two notions have always mutually 
influenced each other. Man needs the conviction of union 
with God to make and keep himself truly great. He rises 
to higher than human levels in its operative presence. He 
sinks to less than human levels in its absence. And of this, 
all that we are throughout to say is progressive proof. 

The plan of the following study needs but little com- 
ment. Under the conviction that we do not know any idea 
until we have watched it in the making, some attempt is 
made to trace the origin and development of the idea of per- 
sonality. Here much that is usually found in the historical 
discussions of technical personality may be omitted. Since 
the aim in view is application rather than exposition, it is 
relatively easy to be complete without going into all the by- 
paths of detail which, however interesting, would not alter 
the general features of the historical picture. The points 
of stress are the values of personality. Accordingly the 
idea of personality is traced out from the side of the indi- 
vidual and from the side of society. It should be borne in 
mind throughout that no separation of these two aspects is 
ever for a moment contemplated. In the chapters that treat 
of man's social activity, emphasis, by the necessity of the 
case, had to be placed on the individual. If we say that it is 
a man's duty to contribute what is of worth in his personal- 
ity to society, we imply that that personality must be recog- 
nized and respected. But no isolation, no fanciful with- 



IX 

drawal of the individual from society is suggested. The 
chapters on the physical, the psychological, the religious, 
and the ethical person form one definite group. Eeligion 
and ethics are placed within the individual, because in 
the Christian religion they have always been looked upon as 
the safeguard and the inspiration of personality. Naturally, 
their social value is not denied. The chapters on sociologi- 
cal, political, and economic theory from another definite 
group. Both sets of chapters correct and supplement each 
other. 



CHAPTEE ONE. 



THE CHRISTIAN ORIGIN OF THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

A "person" in classical language meant a "mask," 
then a "character," and later in judicial thought, a "sub- 
ject of rights." This last meaning was arbitrary, a fiction 
of the law, and did not connote in the person any real basis 
for rights. The latter were regarded purely as the crea- 
tions of the State. Christian speculation originated the 
definition of person as a " real being. ' ' These two chapters 
explain the origin, development, and application of this 
idea. 

Person, as employed in the thought of the Fathers, was 
first applied to the nature and activity of God. We must be 
prepared, therefore, for a considerable amount of metaphy- 
sics, but to condemn the Fathers because they were meta- 
physical is beneath criticism. Despite Comte's so-called 
"law," there are no such things in the annals of thought as 
unrelated periods, to be characterized as mythical, meta- 
physical, and scientific. The savage used in his thinking 
some of the principles of modern science, though he failed in 
their proper understanding and application. Anyone who 
has read Herbert Spencer knows that the inclination to be 
metaphysical did not perish with the Middle Ages. Besides, 
the Fathers were not metaphysical in the sense that they 
loved speculation for speculation's sake. They were, as a 
rule, bishops, that is, they were men immersed in practical 
affairs. They all disliked controversy. Some of them, the 
iron-souled Tatian, the severe Irenaeus, the perplexed Hil- 
ary, seem to have looked with considerable disfavor on pro- 
fessional philosophy. 1 This does not mean that the Chris- 
tian religion was entirely on a plane of emotionalism. Some 
explicit formulation of the original data of Christian belief 
is evident from the very start. It is perceived in S. Paul 

1 Cfr. Hilary, De Trinitate, 1, 13 ; IX, S ; XII, 19. 



THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 



and S. John. It is more pronounced in Barnabas, Theophi- 
lus, and Athenagoras, and still more so in Justin and Iren- 
aeus. What we mean to say is that when the great philo- 
sophical synthesis began in the third century, it had for its 
aim the preservation of the vigorous and concrete religious 
life of the first two centuries. 

During the formative era of Christian thought, the atti- 
tude of the teachers towards theological and philosophical 
problems involved in the Gospel narrative was largely nega- 
tive, owing to the fact that up to the fourth century Our 
Lord's work, not His Person, was the object of considera- 
tion. Moral injunctions were accepted, and doctrines as- 
sented to, as if these were to be taken for granted. The 
problem was to reduce belief to action. Thus, God was a 
kind and loving Father. Jesus Christ was the Redeemer of 
the world, and the Brother of men. The Holy Ghost was 
the sanctifier of men, who dwelt in the souls of the just. Be- 
lievers were heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. They 
were temples of the Holy Ghost. 1 The idea of God com- 
prehended chiefly a plan of personal relations. It was the 
Personality, rather than the essence or nature of God, that 
appealed to the intellects of Christians, that warmed their 
imaginations, that inspired their conduct. 

Later on there came men who taught that Jesus Christ 
was not God, and that the Holy Ghost was not God. These 
denials did not merely shatter intellectual positions. They 
undermined the entire Christian life, which had already 
found expression in the baptismal formulas and the creeds, 
which had grown strong and fervid through the sacramental 
system, and which was already seeking social expression in 
the liturgy and organization of the Church. When the 
Fathers took up the work of defense, it was with the con- 
sciousness that they were struggling for a Faith that had 
already changed a good part of the world and that was try- 
ing to come to as full a rational understanding of itself as 

1 Every page of the New Testament is dotted with such allusions as Roms. 
VIII. 15 : 1 Cor. VIII. 6 : 2 Cor. I. 3 : VI. 18 : Eph. IV. 6 : V. 20 ; I Pet. I. 
17; Roms. Ill, 24; 1 Cor. I, 4; Philip. I, 11; 1 Tim. I, 15; Roms. VIII 
17; 1 Cor. VI, 9. 



THE CHRISTIAN ORIGIN. 



it could, under the existing limitations of thought and lan- 
guage. 

It is not necessary here to trace out in detail the doc- 
trinal discussions that bore on the problem of personality. 
No man, unless he has new evidence to adduce, can hope to 
improve on the historical analysis made by De Regnon with 
reference to the Trinitarian controversies. 1 It is enough if 
we show that the effort to comprehend personality in God 
was necessitated by the Christian relation of man to God, 
and was never, even at the moment of greatest speculation, 
anything more than an endeavor to put on a definite, 
rational basis a vast amount of concrete, religious knowl- 
edge and experience. 

The obvious distinction between Latin and Greek 
theology during the fourth century is too commonplace to 
demand more than a mere mention. What is important is 
that both East and West had a common end — the defense 
of the baptismal formula which characterized the life of the 
Christian as being in God through the Father, the Son, and 
the Holy Ghost. After baptism the Christians " walked in 
the newness of this life. ' ' 2 Sabellius taught that the Father, 
Son, and Holy Ghost were three aspects of the same Person. 
Arius asserted that the Son was a creature of the Father. 
Eunomius and Macedonius maintained that the Holy Ghost 
was a creature of the Son. How little Constantine under- 
stood the Christians and the spirit of S. Paul when he sug- 
gested that perhaps the misunderstanding was about words. 
Ideas were at stake, ideas that, so to speak, reeked with the 
blood of martyrs and with the dust and sweat of everyday 
life. Ideas never meant so much in any age as they did to 
the Christians of those centuries. 3 The crowds surging 
through the streets of Paris on the eve of the great Revolu- 
tion had not half the interest in their ideas, that was pos- 
sessed by the crowds that fought in the streets of Alexan- 
dria. Christians felt that their very life-blood was being 
sapped from them, for by no other comparison could they 
estimate teachings that would degrade two Persons of the 

1 La Sainte Trinite, Paris, 1892. 

2 Roms. VI. 3-4. 

3 For an example, consult the words of S. Gregory Nazianzen, Orat. XX 



THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 



Blessed Trinity, and that would make of the intimate union 
between Christ and the believer, and of the work of the Holy 
Ghost in their souls, mere fictions, delusions, or at best, ex- 
aggerations. 

It was to preserve the Christian life, the Christian doc- 
trine of salvation, the Christian inspiration, moral code, 
sacramental system, liturgy, and organization, that the 
Fathers entered into controversy. The Christian apologist 
did not seek intellectual props for a religion that showed 
signs of decay. He was trying to express the abundance of 
its life, in all that he thought and wrote. Any neophyte in 
the catechetical schools could have given a firm mental as- 
sent to the truth which the heretics denied. In fact, in the 
Western Church, at least until the time of Rufinus, the the- 
ology of the Three Persons amounts to little more than a 
constant chain of affirmations. It is a striking phenomenon 
that Victorinus, the only Latin writer who manifested a 
positive predilection for philosophy, was the very one whose 
influence was the most ephemeral, and who was blamed as 
early as S. Jerome's time for his obscurity, although, in 
truth, the great Scriptural scholar was not a man to lend 
any theologian a sympathetic ear. 

The system of Victorinus is interesting in view of what 
has been said regarding the relation of Christian doctrine 
to philosophy. Victorinus was a converted rhetorician who 
wrote somewhere between 355 and 360. He starts with the 
ideas of action, motion, and change. God is action, and con- 
sequently motion, but not change. 1 This motion in God is a 
production which, with reference to contingent beings, is 
creation, but which, with reference to the Word, is genera- 
tion. 2 The Word is eternal and consubstantial with the 
Father. 3 He is the Father's will in action. 4 He is the 



3 i)e Generatione Vcrli Dlvini, 30 (P. L., VIII, col. 1035A) ; Adv. Arium, 

1, 43 (P. L., VIII, col. 1074A). 
2 De Generatione, 29, 30 (col. 1034, 1035A). 
s Adv. Arium, 1, 34, (col. 1067C) ; I, 1 (col. 1039D) ; IV, 21, (col. 1128) ; 

De Generatione, I, (col. 1019D). 
4 Adv. Arium, I, 31, (col. 1064A). 



THE CHRISTIAN ORIGIN. 



image by which the Father knows himself. 1 In fine, he is 
the realization of the active power which the Father is. The 
Word is equal to the Father, because the Father has given 
all his dignity and substance to the Son. But he is in- 
ferior to the Father precisely because he holds everything 
from the Father. 2 This inferiority is, then, not one of na- 
ture, but a result of his Sonship. The Neo-Platonic basis 
of these explanations made them rather difficult for the 
Christian contemporaries of Victorinus, and makes them 
still more difficult for us, to understand. The remaining 
Western theologians proceeded quite differently. They 
were not seeking ideas, but a language to express the ideas. 
They did not wish to supplement the baptismal formula but 
to elaborate it, so as to meet the new intellectual needs. 

The facts in the case were these. From the beginning 
there had been a steadfast belief in the Father, Son, and 
Holy Ghost, who were thought of as being equal, distinct, 
and complete in themselves. The Christians accepted this 
statement and lived and prayed accordingly. As a rule, the 
Bishops told the people not to ask for more, not "to be more 
wise than it behooveth to bej wise." 3 But the heretics 
threatened to disturb the balance of Christian thought and 
life. It became necessary, therefore, to put the content of 
the Christian ideas in a definite, scientific terminology. The 
latter, for the West, was built up principally on the words 
nature, substance, and person; and, for the East, on the 
words ousia and hypostasis. These various terms were not 
appropriated because they were connected with with any 
scheme of philosophy — Aristotelianism, Neo-Platonism, or 
what not — that would have made the Christian explanations 
easier. They were adopted precisely because they were the 
best words for the problem to be found in the vocabulary of 
the people, or at least because they were susceptible of a 
meaning that could be grasped without much reasoning on 
the part of the common folk. They had no more special 

1 Adv. Avium, I, 31. (col. 1064A). 57 (col. 1083-1084). 

2 Adv. Avium, I, 42, (col. 1073A), 57 (col. 1084A) ; III, 7, (col. 1103-04) ; 

IV, 20, (col. 1128A) ; De Q-enevatione, 2 (col. 1021A) ; Adv. Avium, 

I, 13, (col 1047C). 
8 See Gregory Nazianzen's Address to his flock {Ovat. XX). 



THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 



affinity with any philosophical school than our word ma- 
terial has with the materialists, or the word absolute with 
the philosophy of Fichte. With out few exceptions in all Pa- 
tristic literature, the terms cited have always retained the 
specific concrete meaning which they were first introduced 
to express. 

The revealed truth of the Trinity had two sides, or as- 
pects, both of which are illustrated in the different attitudes 
taken by East and West. The Greeks said that we know 
the Personality of God before we know his nature. The 
Latins held that we must know God as One, before we can 
know Him as three Persons. Here we meet with the peren- 
nial question as to the distinction between nature and per- 
son. The Greek view was perhaps nearer the primitive 
fact, for God had actually, in the Christian arrangement, re- 
vealed himself as Triune. 

The language of the Latin Church was formed very 
early. Tertullian 's well known formula of "One God in 
Three Persons," remained the practical doctrinal standard 
of the West. Original Latin speculation was centered on the 
notion that God is One. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are 
all equal, all have full Divinity, for all are the same sub- 
stance. 1 Tertullian first used the word person. 2 This term 
was perfectly familiar to the common and legal language of 
the period in the West. It said more than any Father ever 
wished it to say, but it was convenient, and expressed with 
sufficient clearness the distinction in the Godhead that the 
Latin theologians desired to bring out. The Fathers were 
always careful to restrict the meaning to distinction, and to 

1 Tertullian, Adv. Praxeam, II, VII, IX. Hilary, De Trin., Ill, 23 ; IV, 40, 

42 ; VIII, 41 ; De Synodis, 67-69 ; 71, 73, 75, 88. The foregoing texts 
refer to the Son. With regard to the Holy Ghost, Hilary does not ex- 
pressly call him God, but does so equivalently for the Holy Ghost is of 
the same substance as the Father and the Son (De Trin. I, 36; II, 4; 
XII, 55). Phebadius, Bishop of Agen, who wrote after 357, is a good 
witness because he adhered closely to the strict Latin tradition : De 
Filii Divinitate. 6 (P. L.. XX. col. 42-43) : 7 (col. 44) ; Contra Arianos, 
22 (col. 30) ; Libellus Fidei (col. 49). S. Ambrose and S. Jerome offer 
additional testimony but the former only repeats Hilary, while the lat- 
ter gives only the conclusions that he wishes to account as of Faith. 
8 Adv. Praxeam, cc. XII-XIII (P. L. II, col. 168-170). 



THE CHRISTIAN ORIGIN. 



exclude division. 1 The separate life of the Son was ex- 
plained as being the result of generation, a word which, like 
person, was also taken in an analogous sense. 2 Latin the- 
ology had at the time no such precise word to indicate the 
distinct life of the Holy Ghost. Tertullian had given the 
phrase "a Patre per Filium." While the latter was ac- 
cepted as the normal expression, it was explained with a 
great deal of reserve. The meaning usually attached by S. 
Hilary and S. Ambrose is that the Son is a true and active 
principle who, together with the Father, produces the Holy 
Spirit. 3 

The great importance of S. Augustine, so far as we are 
concerned, is that he insisted more on the moral, than on 
the metaphysical, aspect of personality in God. This is to 
be expected from so profound an analyst of self-conscious- 
ness. True, he did a great deal towards clearing up the 
notions that were in common use among theologians to des- 
ignate the Trinity. But what interests us is that almost at 
the apex of speculation in the West we find so able an ex- 
ponent coming back to the point from which all discussion 
had started. In this connection the seven books of the De 
Trinitate (IX-XV) have a significance which we might not 
at first be inclined to give them. They consist chiefly of 
analogies for the Trinity. Thus, in the fourteenth book, 
the author discovers the image of the Blessed Trinity in the 
memory, knowledge, and love of God, for it is mainly then 
that the soul — which is God's natural likeness because of its 
three faculties of memory, intelligence, and will — becomes 
still more His likeness by the thought of God who lives in 
it. Here is the end of all speculation. Father, Son, and 
Holy Ghost are really and equally God. Each is a Person, 
not because the term exhausts the mysteries of the Trinity, 
but because it preserves to the weak understanding of man 
the primitive, revealed truth that the Father, Son, and Holy 

1 Hilary, De Synodis, 64, 69 ; De Trin., I, 16 ; IV, 20 ; VII, 2, 32. 

2 Hilary, De Trin., VI, 23-27 ; XII, 23-32. Ambrose, De Vwg., Ill, 1, 3. 

8 Hilary, De Trin., VIII, 20, 26 ; XII, 56. Ambrose, De Spiritu Sancto, II, 
118; I, 152. The same doctrine is to be found in Phebadius, De Filii 
Divinitate, II, (col. 49), and in Victorinus, Adv. Arium, III, 8 (col. 
1105A.B). 



THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 



Ghost can be treated with, can be in some measure known, 
and should be loved. " Cor ad cor loquitur. ' ' 

The analysis of divine Personality among the Greeks is 
especially interesting, because a love of speculation has al- 
ways been associated with the East. The development of 
thought is more difficult to follow, but we select only the 
main currents of ideas in order to show that the final status 
of Christian reflection in the Eastern Church was, just as in 
the Latin, based on the facts of the Christian life. 

Arius had attacked the divinity of the Son. Eunomius 
had called the Holy Ghost a creature of the Son. The Nicene 
Symbol had re-affirmed the faith of the Church in the Di- 
vinity of the Son. The Council of Nicaea had not insisted 
specially on the Divinity of the Holy Ghost, because this 
part of the heretical teaching of Arius, as well as that of 
Eunomius, had been kept in the background till 359-60. 
Athanasius held a council in Alexandria in February, 362, in 
which those were condemned who said that "the Holy Ghost 
was a creature and separate from the substance of Christ. ' ' 
Later on the error was formally condemned in the second 
ecumenical Council of Constantinople. 1 In the West, the 
decisions of Nicaea were renewed in four councils held at 
Rome, under the auspices of Pope Damasus. The fourth of 
these councils, sitting in 380, summarized the condemnations 
of the Apollinarists, Sabellians, Arians, and Macedonians, 
and restated the Catholic teaching with regard to the Per- 
sons of the Blessed Trinity. 2 This was the practical situa- 
tion. But the attempts at rational explanation were much 
more involved. The doctrinal struggle in the East was car- 
ried on principally by two groups of polemics, which fol- 
lowed each other, though remaining distinct. S. Athana- 
sius is the chief champion of the first group. Basil and the 
two Gregories are the main figures in the second group. The 
former defined ideas and elaborated doctrine. The latter 
definitely fixed terminology and concluded discussion. 

S. Athanasius starts his theory with the notion of 
Eedemption. For him the Incarnate Word is above all a 

1 Canon 1, Denzinger, Enchiridion, N. 85 (ed. 1911). Mgr. Duchesne doubts 

this : Eglises separ4es. Paris, 1905, pp. 77-80. 

2 Canons 1-24, Denzinger, op. cit., Nos. 59-82. 



THE CHRISTIAN ORIGIN. 



Redeemer, and this Redemption, by which man is deified 
and becomes the child of God, consists in the union of onr 
nature with the Divine nature in the Person of Jesus 
Christ. Jesus is truly God, for unless he himself is, really 
and by nature, God and Son of God, he cannot deify us 
and raise us even to an adopted divine sonship; This new 
point of view brings into relief the concept Son and leaves 
the concept Word in the background ; the Divine Personality 
of the Logos is not accounted for by his demiurgic function. 
No doubt, Athnasius holds that, in fact, the Son was the 
organ of creation; but he adds also that, in principle and 
absolutely, this was not necessary, for if God cannot imme- 
diately create, neither can the Word who is of the same 
nature as the Father and if the Word has been created, God, 
who has created him, can create immediately and of him- 
self. 1 God is one. He is an indivisible monad, and there 
is but one supreme principle. 2 On the other hand, we know 
that the Son is really distinct from the Father. 3 Hence, in 
order to preserve God's unity, shall we exclude the Son 
from the Divine substance; or, to preserve the Son's Divin- 
ity, shall we place Him in the Divine substance ; and if we do 
so, how account for the continuance of the Divine Unity? 
This summary is sufficient to let one see the orientation of 
Athanasian theology. The solutions of the great Doctor 
are far more clear than they are subtle. 

Athanasius readily conceded that there is a chasm be- 
tween God and creatures. Instead, however, of placing 
the Son on the creature- side of the chasm, as Arius did, 
Athanasius placed him on the side of God. The Word is 
not created. He is begotten. To beget is to produce a per- 
fect likeness of oneself and to communicate all that is in 
oneself — substance, nature and glory — and this is the way 
in which the Father produces the Son. 4 



1 De Decretis, 30 ; Contra Arianos, II, 24, 25, 40. 

2 Contra Arianos, III, 15. 

3 IUd., Ill, 4. 

4 Hid., I, 14, 16, 25, 27, 28 ; II, 24, 41 ; III, 6, 62, 66 ; De Decretis, II, 12, 15, 

19, 23, 30 ; De Synodis, 41, 48, 53. 



10 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

The teaching of Athanasius on the subject of the Holy 
Ghost is no less full than on that of the Son. It is to be 
found in the First, Third and Fourth Letters to Serapion. 
Athanasius bases the belief in the Divinity of the Holy 
Ghost on Scripture, on ecclesiastical preaching and tra- 
dition, and on the working of the Holy Ghost in our souls. 
A sanctifying principle cannot be of the same nature as 
those whom it sanctifies ; the Spirit that vivifies creatures 
cannot be a creature. 1 Since the Holy Ghost deifies us and, 
through his indwelling within us, makes us partakers of 
the Divine nature, He himself is God by his very essence. 2 

There are, in addition to this main stream of exposi- 
tion, numerous side currents, devoted to the study of 
special aspects and problems, but with these we need not 
concern ourselves. Nothing could be more evident than 
the fact that Athanasius never departed from the certain- 
ties of a healthy Christian life. Perhaps this was one 
reason why his terminology was incomplete and indefinite. 
He had no word to designate person, and he studiously 
avoided prosopon. To the end of his life he identified the 
words ousia and hypostasis. 5 Nor did he investigate pre- 
cisely the constitution and differentiation of the Persons in 
the Godhead. This latter was the defect that the Cappado- 
cians attempted to remedy. 

The East did not settle so easily on words for what the 
West called substantia and persona. The meanings of ousia 
and hypostasis were in an exceedingly fluid state. The Cap- 
padocians made a direct attack on the problem by asking 
pointedly: What is an ousia? And what a hypostasis? S. 
Basil took up the matter in his thirty-eighth letter, to S. 
Gregory of Nyssa. Ousia is that which is common to the 
individuals of the same species, that which all equally 
possess, that on account of which all are specified by the 
same word. It designates no particular individual. 4 But 
the ousia cannot really exist unless it is determined and 

1 Letter I, 23. 

2 Ibid., 24. 

3 Epist. ad Afros, 4. 

* Letter XXXVIII, 2. 



THE CHRISTIAN ORIGIN. 11 

completed by some individuating characteristics. If we 
add these individuating characteristics to ousia, we have 
an hypostasis. In other words, a hypostasis is a deter- 
mined individual which exists apart, and which possesses 
and comprises an ousia, although it is opposed to the latter 
as the proper to the common, the particular to the general. 1 

The Cappadocians were, therefore, explicitly in favor 
of Origen's distinction between ousia and hypostasis, and 
they were successful in winning recognition for their view. 
As to the use of the word prosopon, Basil Was more re- 
served. He did not admit that it could be looked upon as 
being synonymous with hypostasis, because as was claimed 
by the Sabellians, one hypostasis could play three parts. 2 
Gregory of Nazianzen, on the contrary, held that prosopon 
could be used in connection with the Trinity, provided the 
meaning of a mere personage of tragedy or comedy were 
entirely set aside. 3 

There are, then, in God three hypostases, each one of 
which is opposed to the other two by its own special charac- 
teristics. S. Basil, S. Gregory of Nyssa and S. Gregory 
Nazianzen differed when it came to settling just what the 
characteristics should be. 4 What was agreed upon as cer- 
tain was merely this : the distinctive features of the Divine 
Persons are involved in the origins of these Persons and 
in their mutual opposition. 5 It is in this sense, S. Basil 
writes, that we say that the Father is greater than the Son, 
not because He is so by nature, but because we conceive 
ideally the principle as superior to what flows from it. 6 
The difference is that which exists between the logical and 
the real; and, while expressed a little more delicately, is 
identical with the conclusion to which we saw Victorinus 
come. 

1 S. Basil, Letter XXXVIII, 3 ; Letter CCXXXVI, 6. 

1 Letter CCXXXVI, 6. 

8 Orat. XLII, 16. 

4 Basil: Epistle XXXVIII, 4-6; CXXV, 3; Homilia, XV, 2. Gregory of 
Nyssa: Quod non sint tres Dii (P. G., XLV, 133). Gregory of Nazian- 
zen : Orat. XXV, 16 ; XXIX, 2 ; XXXI, 8, 12, 29 ; XXIII, 11. 

5 Basil. Adv. Eunomium. I, 4-5; Greg. Naz., Orat. XXXI, 9; Gregory of 
Nyssa. Quod non sint tres Dii. 

8 Adv. Eunomium, I, 20. 



12 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

The definition of hypostasis, given by the Cappado- 
cians, was correct, so long as human personality is alone 
considered. The identification, however, of hypostasis with 
individual substance, and the singling out of individual 
characteristics as the constituent elements of personality, 
made the definition a rather unwieldy instrument for un- 
ravelling the mystery of the Trinity. The human nature 
assumed by Christ was individual, but was not a person. 
Perhaps we should not be too captious. The definition was, 
for the period, an excellent piece of analysis; and, while 
the difficulties were not perceived, the meaning was per- 
fectly clear. The orthodoxy of the Cappadocians is beyond 
peradventure, as is testified by the expression of S. Gregory 
of Nazianzen: "The hypostases are perfect, self-existent, 
numerically distinct, but not separate in the Godhead." 1 
Leontius of Byzantium tried to correct the defective ter- 
minology of the Cappadocians by giving more prominence 
to existence per se than to individuality. 2 This new turn in 
the investigation finally resulted in the developed concept 
of personality. 

The full truth of personality began to dawn on the 
Christian teachers from the moment that they made person 
equivalent to subsistence. Victorinus had used the word, 
but its significance seems to have been lost on his contem- 
poraries. Victorinus himself may not have fathomed all 
its import. 3 Eufinus is usually credited with coining the 
word subsistentia in the year 401. "Substantia rei alicu- 
ius," he notes, "Naturamj rationemque qua constat de- 
signet; subsistentia autem uniuscuiusque personae hoc ip- 
sum quod exstat et subsistit ostendat." 4 Whether this was 
a happy intuition of Eufinus himself, ruminating on the 
speculations of Latins and Greeks, or merely a compromise 
word for an idea concerning which, as indeed the remarks 
of the historian would lead us to believe, both East and 

1 Orat. XXXIII, 16. 

"Contra Nest, et Eutych. (P. G., LXXXVI, 1280-12S9). 

*Adv. Arvum, I. 41 (P. L., VIII. col. 1072A) ; II. 4 (col. 1092D) ; III. 4 

(col. 1101D). 
4 Hist. Eccles., Lib I, cap. 29. 



THE CHRISTIAN ORIGIN. 13 

West were in entire accord, must continue a matter of con- 
jecture. S. Augustine was apparently unacquainted with 
the idea, while S. Jerome makes a declaration that is the 
direct ojDposite of what Bufinus affirms. 1 

The meaning of subsistence, with reference to the Per- 
sons in the Trinity, was formed in late Patristic and in 
Scholastic theology somewhat along the following lines. 
Subsistence is not the same as substance. Each of the three 
Persons in the Trinity is the whole substance. Subsistence 
does not denote an opposition of nature, for independence 
in an exclusive sense cannot be predicated of the Trini- 
tarian Persons. Personality must be attributed to the 
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, only in an analogous deri- 
vation. These elements will be recognized as constant and 
invariable in the entire Patristic tradition. Subsistence 
offered something new in the way of a basis of distinction. 
Subsistence must apply only to the properties and activities 
of the Divine Persons. The absolute properties of God, 
such as goodness, mercy and wisdom, cannot be opposed to 
one another. The relative properties that are founded on 
the Son's having been generated, and on the Holy Ghost's 
having proceeded from the Father and the Son, are op- 
posed. The plurality of Persons is deduced from these 
relative properties. Subsistence, as existence per se, is 
not a positive attribute of each of the three Persons. 2 In 
other words, no one of the Divine Persons can exist without 
the other two. Existence per se belongs to God as One. 
Each of the Persons, however, partakes of such existence; 
and in view of His distinct, though not separate, life is 
properly the object of a personal relation both among the 
Persons themselves, and with reference to men. This per- 
sonal quality of Father, Son and Holy Ghost is of the ut- 
most importance to the Christian life, and justifies the 
prayers, sacrifices and adoration offered to the Three as 
distinct. 

For those who say that all religions are equally use- 
less, or even injurious, the account of the Patristic effort 
to formulate the Christian idea of God will be valueless. 

1 Epistle XV, 4. Cfr. De Regnon, op. cit., pp. 216-227. 

2 S. Thomas, Summa, I, Q. 30, art. 1 ad. 2. 



14 THE IDEA OF PEKSONALITY. 



Christianity to a folk so minded can be interesting only as 
a chapter in the history of superstition. Such an uncom- 
promising interpretation of religious data is evidently be- 
yond the possibility of successful treatment, at least in 
the present connection. Before we close this chapter we 
shall have occasion to revert indirectly to this aspect of the 
subject; but for the time being, there is a radical difference 
of principles which renders discussion idle. Those, on the 
contrary, who concede that religion is an undeniably real 
factor in human progress mast make some effort to ap- 
praise the worth of the Christian doctrinal and moral 
teaching. It is not necessary, either, that we should be 
convinced that religion is the chief motive power of prog- 
ress. We may share the passionate trust that made 
Lord Acton see in the Catholic Religion an infallible recipe 
for the ills of mankind. Or we may be as coldly unenthusi- 
astic as Professor Giddings, when he designates religion 
"a minor side of life." The point is, the recognition that 
what we are, what our civilization and progress are, cannot 
be fully explained until we have taken into account the facts 
of religious history. 

Historically, religion may be summarized as the belief 
that God (or the gods) can both be known and loved; and 
as the attempt to reproduce this belief in conduct. Re- 
ligion has never had a value, or at least a value that men 
could appreciate, except when its concept involved the pos- 
sibility of communion with the Deity. Thus, in the very 
bed of religious consciousness we find the idea of personal- 
ity firmly rooted. It would appear, consequently, that the 
religious investigator must take personality for granted, 
just as the scientist takes the law of the conservation of 
energy. And this undoubtedly holds, if we consider the 
testimony of spontaneous religious experience. On the 
other hand, religious consciousness whenever, outside 
Christianity, it has become reflexive, has tried to eliminate 
Personality from the Divine. This tendency has been the 
unvarying feature of cultured, as opposed to popular, re- 
ligious attitudes. The Greek physicists justly repudiated 



THE CHRISTIAN ORIGIN. 15 



anthropomorphism; and then, religious philosophy, after 
the Eleatics, was strongly in favor of de-personalizing the 
Divine. 1 

The works of the great Greek dramatists are interest- 
ing indications of the temper of the elite. Aeschylus, the 
most pious of them all, cut down the number of the gods, 
which was a good thing, and began the process of removing 
the Ultimate Power from the sphere of knowledge, which 
was not so good. 2 With Sophocles Zeus becomes a symbol 
for invisible justice. Euripides divorced completely the 
cultured from the popular theology. Half the charm of 
Greek tragedy lay in the appeal for sympathy, created by 
the sight of human helplessness, of heroes and heroines 
crushed by remoreless destiny, The last hope is that 
somewhere, somehow there may be a Power who will one 
day vindicate the right, but who for the present is not 
concerned in human affairs. Such is the messianism of 
these stern old moralists. From the side of philosophy, 
the cultured tradition comes to the surface in Plato's self- 
evolving Thought, Aristotle's first Cause, the Anima Mundi 
of the Stoics, the view of nature as a maintenance of type, 
which the Epicureans proposed. Immanence, Absolutism, 
Monism, and the more recent social concept of God, are 
modern variations of the same tradition. 

The Greeks were, no doubt, right in charging that the 
notion of personality had been the occasion whereby relig- 
ious belief had been deflected into polytheisitc channels. 
They were wrong in assuming that the idea could never 
have begotten anything better than a system of plural, man- 
like gods. If the first races had possessed a keener and 
more accurate knowledge of the spiritual qualities of per- 
sonality, a clearer vision of what is implied and disclosed 
therein, they could have come to monotheism with not more 
trouble than had led them, for lack of that penetration, into 
polytheism. When the Greek scholars themselves became 
imbued later with strong pantheistic inclinations they but 



1 For an assertion of Xenophanes' pantheism see Aristotle, Met., I, 5. 

5 The latter feature is illustrated in the first choral ode of the Agamemnon. 



16 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

followed, albeit unconsciously, one of two possible issues to 
polytheism which, on the one hand may degenerate into 
fetichism or, on the other, rise to pantheism. 

The defect of all pantheism and near-pantheism is that 
many facts of psychical life have to be ignored or distorted. 
All men are more or less perplexed by the relation between 
themselves and the cosmic order. But there are deep re- 
cesses of thought and strong movements of feeling and 
volition that protest against any total absorption that would 
make individual life unintelligible and meaningless. All 
men suspect in their own way what the French dramatist 
phrases so passionately: "Toute la nature sans moi est 
vaine; c'est moi qui lui confere sons sens." It is, as pan- 
theists assert, difficult to understand "how beings can be 
self-contained persons and at the same time elements of 
the Divine life". 1 But it will always be a greater puzzle 
as to how things distinct by every known norm can act one 
in another. 2 The craving for single life has never been 
more insistent than when, as in the days of Cynics, So- 
phists and Stoics, the whole burden of tradition, training, 
and environment has been thrown in the other direction. 
If I ask for a rational explanation of my life, I do not ob- 
tain it when I am told that my subjectivity is only a dot 
whereon rests a portion of the universal Subject; that my 
mind is merely the awakening of the total Mind; that my 
will is simply the activity of Absolute Will, functioning at 
a specific point of resistance. Does not all this create more 
difficulties than it solves 1 How does it release us, as Fichte 
promised "from the fear that has tormented and degraded 
us?" 3 Freedom is assuredly not attained by magnifying 
the conditions of slavery; and the Cosmos is not less a 
master because it is given absolute, all-embracing power. 

I can imaginatively suppose that I hear, with Nietzsche, 
the mystic music of some distant era, rejoicing in men 
superior to ourselves and of stronger fibre. I may be wall- 
ing, like Fichte, to dash myself in a moment of superlatively 

1 Schurman, Belief in God, p. 226. 

2 The Scholastic doctrine of moderate realism does not pretend to any more 

erudite foundation than common sense. 

3 Fichte's Works, edited by W. Smith, London, 1873, p. 304. 



THE CHRISTIAN ORIGIN. 17 

heroic emotion against the rock of present circumstances as 
an immolation to the Absolute. I may even be impressed 
by Mr. Well's God, struggling upward in humanity in some 
Manichean fashion, and be content to take my stand man- 
fully beside my neighbors. But these are not creeds for 
practical men. The necessary mood cannot endure long 
enough. A philosophy of the imagination may at times act 
as a mental soothing-syrup, as a soft poem may quiet over- 
wrought nerves; but we require something more stimu- 
lating in the presence of the mysteries of life, pain and 
individuality. The answer, if answer there be, to all the 
ceaseless questionings of our minds is not likely ever to 
come from a cult of wise men, who from the beginning, 
have looked down "from their lonely watch-towers apart" 
on the abandoned rabble, half in pity and half in contempt. 
Plato obtaining presumable redemption for the philoso- 
phers; Seneca idealizing God, the Father and Creator, 
past all meaning ; Hegel transferring the idea of the Abso- 
lute to the idea of the State in general; and more recent 
writers to the idea of Society — if this is the mess of pottage 
for which the populace is asked to sell its birthright, who 
will assure us that the end will not be the same anyway 
when "enlightenment has captured the machinery of des- 
potism". As if the universe had held a sort of general 
election and decided to rule by majorities ; to override the 
special case for the general welfare; to see men only as 
they act in masses; to promulgate a set of collective and 
compulsory legislation where there are no deeper claims 
acknowledged in our nature, than are to be found in the 
appeal to some barren and lifeless abstraction — class, state 
or race — where the predominant conception by which all is 
tested is the idea of automatic, unrelenting, fatalistic prog- 
ress; where no mercy can be shown those members of the 
human family who lag behind the ironical march of 
progress. 1 

1 This conception of progress is supposed to be proved by Darwin's dis- 
covery of variation. The use of physical science in all these questions 
is very extensive. Even pantheistic philosophy will appeal for its view 
that matter is the self -unfolding fringes of the divine eternal substance 
to Fechner's assertion that protoplasm and zoophyte are not inchoate 
matter of organization, but the cast-off residuum of all previous dif- 
ferentiation. 



18 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

Popular religion has had its faults of thought and 
action. We smile at the personal-soul concept expressed in 
the form that Tylor says was original to lower races. 1 We 
no longer care for the stiff soul-body-spirit psychology of 
Irenaeus., 2 We realize that superstition had brought mat- 
ters to a poor pass when Cato charged that no two sooth- 
sayers could meet each other in the street without laugh- 
ing. But the cultured reaction has likewise had its faults, 
and the greatest of these lay in severing itself from the 
main current of historical religion by striving for religious 
purity through the depersonalization of the Divine. 

Christianity maintains that religious development con- 
sists, not in eliminating the idea of personality, but in its 
progressive understanding and application. The con- 
temptuous attitude of the cultured class of today towards 
this notion of notions and idea of ideas finds its parallel in 
pre-Christian Greece and Eome, where no effort was made 
to give it a place in religion, society, and life, because of 
the scorn felt for the primitive. This scorn is misplaced. 
The mental attitudes of primitive peoples were not in 
themselves wrong. There is no difference in principle be- 
tween the logic of early races and that of modern thinkers. 
Primitive man enjoyed a spontaneous use of the principle 
of causality, and he knew also that like is required for the 
production of like. His error lay not in the principles 
which he used but in their interpretation. Thus, he did not 
realize that personality, as such, cannot be attributed to 
God, because of its inherent human associations and limi- 
tations. Nothing of this kind is discernible in the history 
of Christianity. 

The deep and searching controversies which we have 
just reviewed, all go plainly to show that Christian thinkers 
saw in the idea of personality, not a reversion to the primi- 
tive, but a purified deepening of human thought along a 
line which thql philosophers of antiquity had! neglected. 
The controversies of the fourth century revealed one fact 
distinctly — that the notion of personality is not identically, 

1 PrvmMwe Culture, New York, 1889, Vol. 1, p. 428 f ol. 

2 Adv. Haer., Bk. V, c. 6. 



THE CHRISTIAN ORIGIN". 19 



but only proportionally, true when predicated of God. In 
coming to this knowledge, and keeping to this principle of 
proportionality, the Christian thinkers avoided the error of 
primitive man, and at the same time atoned for the studied 
neglect of the idea of personality by the cultured classes 
of antiquity. He would be an unfair critic indeed who 
would see in the disputes of the fourth century a mere 
war of words. They were of a far more worthy nature. A 
notion so high and so far-reaching had been introduced by 
Christianity that the pagan terms in currency were unable 
to express it. We are here, therefore, in the presence of 
the poverty of pagan language, due to the poverty of pagan 
philosophy, on this great point. And if the controversies 
signify anything, it is that Christianity had a new thought, 
not developed by paganism, which it was trying with mind 
and heart to explore. 

Again, we should remember that Christian philosophy 
grew out of the greatest fact in history — the Person and 
work of Jesus Christ. He it was whom the Christians were 
trying to explain ; and the very extraordinary character of 
the Person to be explained led to all the difficulties of 
language which they encountered. They were not reviving 
the primitive when they studied this notion of personality. 
They were investigating the unprecedented and unique. 
The wonders of the Person of Christ led men to explore the 
foundations of their own being, in its light. 



CHAPTER TWO. 

THE SCHOLASTIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

The Fathers, in ascribing personality to God, had as 
a matter of course employed principles deduced from the 
consideration of human personality. But they did not 
organize these presuppositions into anything like a co- 
herent and definite theory of human personality itself. 
The fifth century Patristic view of man was essentially 
the ethical view of the New Testament. The theologians 
believed firmly in the personal worth of each individual, 
but they possessed no well-defined philosophical explana- 
tion that expressed this worth. Besides, since personality 
in the Trinity differed considerably from personality in 
man, further analysis was obviously necessary. The ele- 
ments of futurei philosophical evolution were, however, 
given in the Patristic speculations. With such a notion as 
subsistence, for example, it was relatively easy for Boeth- 
ius to throw the idea of personality into a comprehensive 
form that would apply, with the required qualifications 
in either case, to both God and man. 1 The final work of 
analysis, coordination, and comparison was accomplished 
by S. Thomas, who embodied his conclusions in the defini- 
tion: a person is "a distinct being subsisting in an in- 
tellectual nature. ' ' 2 It is a burden of the remaining pages 
of this discussion to set forth simply what the Scholastics 
meant when they designated the human individual a person. 

To appreciate the metaphysical concept of person 
which the Scholastics constructed, we must bear in mind 
that they sought to discover the real basis of the personal 
self as verified in every human individual existing as a 
reality in itself. As moderate realists, they rejected the 
extremes of nominalism, but conceded a real distinction be- 

1 "Substantia individua naturae rationalis." Lib. de Duatus Naturis, I, V, 

c. 8 (P. L., LXIV, col. 337seq.) 
* "Distinctum subsistens in intellectuali natura," Summa, I, jQ. 29, art. 3, c. 



22 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 



tween individual and individual. It was not enough for a 
man to come into the world with the equipment of a species. 
He possessed a further "intrinsic principle of individu- 
ation." The Schoolmen refused steadily to confound con- 
ceptual unity with actual identity. The Self to them was 
more than a mere frame, a structural outline, into which 
are indiscriminately poured unlimited organic activities, 
nerve reactions, sensations, images and ideas. Whatever 
actually exists, they said, must be, with entire definiteness 
and determinateness, its own self and nothing else. How- 
ever, to apprehend individual realities, to interpret and 
read meaning into them, we must abstract and universalize 
certain aspects of them, and use these aspects as predi- 
cates. The result is more than a mere logical expedient. 
The universal is true of every individual, but it does not 
include the whole of the individual. In the case of person, 
it expresses the fundamental characteristics through which 
the reality of the individual is realized. The Schoolmen 
themselves carefully distinguished between this concrete 
person and the abstract idea of personality. They seem 
to ignore the psychological and social data that must accom- 
pany any concept of the actual self, only because they 
believe, as any one must believe when he is not philosophiz- 
ing, that these phenomena require a fixed center in reality ; 
that they do not in themselves explain the genesis of the 
person. 

It will be the aim of the following chapters to extend 
the ultimate notion of person to its consequences in the 
organic, sentient, and intelligent human individual, with 
his colorful variety and many-sided vitality. One thing 
seems certain at the start: that no amount of derivation 
from consciousness or environment will ever confer per- 
sonality on an individual, who is not in the first instance 
and in his own right, a person. That which makes a per- 
son what he is must be sought in the elementary activities 
of his own being, not merely in the environmental forces 
which modify, but do not create personality. 

Another observation of much significance is that per- 
sonality must be predicated of the whole man. Intellect and 
will, physical organs, body and soul must all be parts of the 



SCHOLASTIC DEVELOPMENT. 23 

person. Everything essential to complete human nature 
constitutes a person. The Scholastics experienced no par- 
ticular difficulty in conceiving a man's body, as well as his 
soul and mind, as part of his person. "Person in any na- 
ture, ' ' wrote S. Thomas, ' ' signifies what is distinct in that 
nature ; as in human nature it signifies this flesh, these bones, 
and this soul which, though not belonging to person in gen- 
eral, nevertheless do belong to meaning of a particular hu- 
man person." 1 While recognizing, however, that the indi- 
vidual human being is really composite, the Schoolmen as- 
serted that he is nevertheless really one. But the source of 
this unity is not a mysteriously absolute little self, holding 
court in the darkest chambers of our inner life and issuing 
decrees and commands to all parts of the man. Such a 
dualism would have been objectionable even to philosophers 
who were less devoted to the Aristotelian principle of unity 
in man than were the Scholastics. 2 

Those who think that the aim of the Scholastics was to 
find an eternal, independent entity in the man, resembling 
an organ or a function, misconceive the entire Scholastic 
situation. Anyone who reads the Schoolmen carefully can 
hardly class their concept of person among those "old 
theories" that pictured a "formless ego, indifferent and un- 
changeable, on which it threads the psychic states it has set 
up as independent entities." 3 Some of our contemporary 
philosophers lack all sense of proportion. They are per- 
petually trying to impale opponents on the horns of an im- 
possible dilemma. Unless we are prepared to admit a self 
for every manifestation of the man, a self for the church 
and a self for the voting-booth, a self for the home and a self 
for the factory, a self for the period of childhood, another 
for the days of courtship, and still another for the years 
of discretion ; unless we accept, in a word, the whole theory 
of "potential selves," we must be forced to maintain that 



1 Summa, Q. 29, art. 4, c. Cfr. Wai-d : "The body then first of all gives to 

the self a certain measure of individuality, permanence, and inward- 
ness." (Ency. Brit., 9th. ed., Vol. XX, p. 84). 

2 Aristotle, De Anima, I, 4, 408b, 11. Gfr. S. Thomas, Summa, I, Q. 75. art. 

2, ad 2 ; I, Q. 29, art. 1, ad 5. 
S H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, New York, 1911, pp. 3-4. 



24 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 



the person is a lordly mannikin imbedded in the skull or the 
cardiac region. The self in Scholastic philosophy is "fixed" 
only because it is itself a reality, not an accidental phenome- 
non. It is not the mere ' ' coalition " of M. Ribot, 1 nor simply 
"a working majority of our multifarious possible selves," 
as in Professor Todd's account of it/ nor just "the aggre- 
gate force resulting from coordination of the elements that 
make up my body, ' ' to which David Starr Jordan reduces 
it. 3 It is the ground of the coalition, the ground of the 
working majority, the ground of the aggregate force. 

To do away with the absurd conceptions that pass cur- 
rent for the Scholastic doctriue of personality is half the 
task of understanding it. The foundation of this definition 
is the notion of man as a complete individual nature, or sub- 
stance. Substantiality is not, of course, confined to man 
alone. It belongs to all things that exist in themselves. It 
may be difficult, especially in the inorganic world and among 
the lower forms of life, to distinguish the real individual 
from what may be only a colony of real individuals. But in 
man, as well as in many instances of plant and animal life, 
there is sufficient evidence for the recognition of an internal 
directive principle, "whereby all the vital functions of the 
organized mass of matter in question are coordinated in 
such a manner as to make for the preservation, growth, and 
development of the whole throughout a definite life cycle 
from birth to death. ' '* Some of this experimental evidence 
in the case of man will be more fittingly introduced in the 
chapters on the physical and the psychological persons. 
Just now we are more concerned with substance, as radically 
expressive of the reality that man is. 

The Schoolmen stood unalterably opposed to the view 
of man as a mere aggregate. They conceived him as a dis- 
tinct being, operating in and through its manifold activity. 
They said further that whatever it is that constitutes per- 
sonality must be ultimately in the nature of a permanent, 
unifying principle in the order of substantial existence. All 
later Scholasticism has refused to accept the philosophic 

1 Diseases of Personality, Open Court, p. 3. 

2 Theories of Social Progress, New York, 1918. p. 22. 
s Footnotes to Evolution, New York, 1898, pp. 271-2. 

4 P. Coffey, Ontology or the Theory of Being, London, 1914, p. 272. 



SCHOLASTIC DEVELOPMENT. 25 

traditions which came down from Locke, Descartes, and 
Kant, and which would identify, in some form or other, the 
habitual consciousness of self or the habitual feeling of per- 
sonal identity with personality itself. Consciousness is 
only an activity, and all activity is of the accidental mode of 
being. The best refutation of the theories of personality 
that assert themselves in terms of conscious activity is that 
they never go very far without admitting a condition that 
is practically equivalent to substantial existence. Witness 
Locke's labored attempt to dissociate person from sub- 
stance. 1 Witness also the inconsistencies of Hume, Kant, 
and T. H. Green. 2 And what is more to the point now-a- 
days, phenomenalism has not become more cogent through 
the use of sociological arguments, than it was when it relied 
exclusively on psychological introspection. Sociologists pro- 
fess to complete psychology, to bring additional explanatory 
data. What they usually do is to incorporate the oldest 
and crudest form of phenomenalism. This, despite the fact 
that Hume, Kant, and our own James, all at one time or 
another have recorded a protest against using the bare ex- 
istence of the phenomena as the total truth. 3 

How, then, is the reality of the person verified in his 
existence as a substantial entity? It is safe to say that 
most attacks on the idea of substance acquire strength only 
because the notion of universal substance (substantia sec- 
unda) has been confused with individual substance (sub- 
stantia prima). This universal is designated a substance 
because it constitutes, and is identical with, the essence of 
the individual person. The universal does not, of course, 
really exist. It is realized only in individuals. Failure to 
appreciate this distinction has led many to describe sub- 
stance as a "substratum," as an unknown something lying 
behind the accidents, as a sort of "bedding." Briefly and 
according to S. Thomas, substance is "a thing to whose na- 
ture it belongs to exist in itself, not in another." 4 It is 



1 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. 11, c. 27, sects. 7, 9. 
*T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, pp. 47, 59, 90-100. 
■ W. James, Psychology. New York, 1890, Vol. 1, p. 344. 

4 "Res cuius naturae debetur esse per se. non in alio," Sum/ma, I, Q. 3, art. 
5, ad 1 ; I, Q. 90, art. 2 ; III, Q. 77, art. 1, 2. 



26 THE IDEA OF PEESOJSTALITY. 

a reality that has a diversified richness according to its 
concrete nature. It is a most generic notion, not to be 
transferred to the real order in the abstract condition un- 
der which the mind conceives it. The concrete individual 
substances that exist are not} mere verifications of this 
widest of notions. They possess a further content, a great- 
er richness of reality, as may be seen in the variety of actual 
substances, which are material, or living, or sentient, or 
rational, or spiritual, all throbbing with different embodi- 
ments of the real. Substance is not a concrete core on 
which accidents are superimposed ; nor an inert substratum 
underlying them, as Descartes thought ; nor is it to be con- 
founded, Leibnitz-fashion, with " agent"; nor is it the per- 
sistence of an object in time, as imagined by Kant and 
Spencer. It is a reality existing in itself, not in another. 1 

But the idea of substance does not exhaust the whole of 
the reality that is denoted by person. The latter is a com- 
plete composite substance more in the sense of a substantial 
unity than in the sense of one substance. It is a unity re- 
sulting from incomplete substances in such a way that all 
the activities of the individual are coordinated and unified 
by a substantial principle. We have to recognize, accord- 
ingly, that the complete individual nature is structurally in- 
communicable, entirely independent in the mode of its actual 
being, and that it is functionally the ultimate principle by 
which all the activities of the individual are discharged, and 
also the ultimate principle which exercises these activities. 
This situation is covered by what is called the "subsistence" 
of the complete individual nature. The relation of sub- 
sistence to substantiality may be shown thus. "A complete 
individual nature or substance, when it exists in the actual 
order, really distinct and separate in its own complete en- 
tity from every other existing being, exercising its powers 
and discharging its functions of its own right and according 
to the laws of its own being, is said to subsist, or to have 
the perfection of subsistence. In this state it not only exists 
in itself, as every substance does; it is not only incommu- 

1 Coffey, op. oit., pp. 225-228. 



SCHOLASTIC DEVELOPMENT. 27 

nicable to any other being as every other individual is , 

but it is also a complete whole, incommunicable as a mere 
integral or essential part to some other whole, unlike the 
incomplete substantial constituents or integral parts, mem- 
bers or organs of, say, an individual organic body; and 
finally it is incommunicable in the sense that it is not capable 
of being assumed into the subsisting unity of some other 

superior 'person'." 1 A person is simply a subsisting 

being that is intelligent. 2 

The task of the Scholastics was not finished, however, 
when they described a person as existing-in-itself, and, fur- 
thermore, as complete, incommunicable, and autonomous in 
its existence and activity. There remained the additional 
question as to whether "any one of the positive perfections 
contained in the notion of subsistence, is a positive some- 
thing over and above, and really distinct from the perfec- 
tion already implied in the concept of a complete individual 
nature as such." 3 In other words, what constitutes sub- 
sistence or personality? The Scholastics have not been 
unanimous in their solutions of this difficulty. Conclusions 
have generally been determined by the attitude taken with 
regard to the controverted distinction between the essence 
and the existence of a created nature. 

Scotus is the most prominent of those who deny the 
distinction between essence and existence; and in his view 
subsistence is not a positive perfection, really distinct from 
the complete individual nature. 4 Subsistence is a mentally 
distinct aspect of the nature consisting in the individual na- 
ture's completeness, its autonomous character, and conse- 
quent incommunicability. The more common view of Cath- 
olic philosophers, however, is that personality is something 
positive and really distinct from the nature, but they do not 
all explain the distinction in the same way. Cardinal Billot 

'Coffey, op. cit., p. 262. 

'The Scholastics reserved the term "subsistence" as being more proper to 
express the reality of a person, although the term would apply also to 
at least the more highly organized animals. The reason for the reser- 
vation is given in S. Thomas, Quaest. Disp., De Potentia, Q. 9, art. 1, 
ad 3. 

8 Coffey, op. cit., p. 266. 

*In Sentent. Ill, Disp. 1. Gfr. Franzelin, De erbo Incar., Th. 29, cor. 3. 



THE IDEA OF PEKSONALITY. 



identifies the subsistence of the complete individual nature 
with its actual existence, and accordingly distinguishes be- 
tween nature and personality. 1 Besides the difficulty of veri- 
fication in natural experience which faces this theory, other 
Thomists urge that actual existence confers no real perfec- 
tion, but only actualizes the real. The most promising 
opinion seems to be that which defines subsistence as a "per- 
fection of the real, essential, or substantial order, as distinct 
from the existential order, a perfection presupposed by 
actual existence, and the proper function of which is to unify 
all the substantial constituents and accidental determina- 
tions of the individual substance or nature, thus making it a 
really unitary being, proximately capable of being actual- 
ized by the simple existential act; which latter is the ulti- 
mate actuality of the real being. ' ', 2 Cajetan and Suarez ap- 
pear to suggest this view, which is now clearly defended by 
such thinkers as Mercier. 3 

The chief thought to be carried away is that subsistence 
or personality is the unifying principle of the concrete in- 
dividual nature. It is not an absolute reality in the sense 
that it differs from the substance, as thing differs from 
thing. It is better described as a substantial mode, to use 
the term of Suarez, naturally superadded to the substance, 
as a result of which the latter not only exists in itself but 
is also incommunicable and the subject of independent right. 
It is real, however, because, while belonging to the order of 
substance, it is not a mere mental aspect of the latter. The 
subsistence of even the most highly organized animals varies 
not only in degree but in kind from the subsistence of a com- 
plete nature possessing intelligence, which is precisely what 
the Schoolmen understood and called by the name of "per- 
son. ' ' Subsistence is thus a positive perfection of the sub- 
stance, which, though naturally inseparable from the latter, 
is not absolutely inseparable. 

The problem of the reality of a person is not one of 
philosophical interest alone. It has a religious, ethical, and 

1 De Deo Uno et Trino, 5th eel.. 1910. p. 135. 
8 Coffey, op. cit., p. 269. 

3 Cajetan. Comment in Summam, III. Q. 4. art. 2 ; Suarez. De Incamat., 
Disp. II, sect. Ill; Mercier, Ontologie, pp. 134-5, 289-302. 



SCHOLASTIC DEVELOPMENT. 29 

political importance as well, and considerable bearing, fur- 
ther away, on all theories of social conduct. It is the decid- 
ing point against that seductive pantheistic picture of na- 
ture, with a spiritual background, "which may be said to 
sleep in the stone, dream in the animal, and again wake to 
life in man. " It is the basis of systems of rights. It is the 
question to be solved before any consistent idea of authority 
can be evolved. The Scholastics are committed once and for 
all to the notion that a person is real, with all the moral, po- 
litical, and economic consequences involved. They deny 
that personality is merely consciousness or any other phe- 
nomenal activity ; and it becomes our business to understand 
how they apply their conviction to the different conditions 
of life. 



CHAPTER THREE 

THE PHYSICAL PEBSON. 

After what has just been said, it will not be suspected 
that this and the following chapters aim at anything more 
than the explicit presentation of personality in its various 
aspects. The man is an ' * unum ens per se. ' ' But the many 
pertinent problems connected with his personality lend 
themselves to intelligent discussion only by attempting some 
such tentative analysis of the person as is here set forth. 
It should not be necessary to insist again on the purpose we 
have in view. 

What, then, is meant by the physical person? In one 
word, it signifies the physical basis of personality. It in- 
cludes certainly the physical organism. It includes also 
conscious life, in so far as the latter can be viewed as the 
counterpart of physiological activity. It may be extended, 
if viewed empirically, to cover all those outer expressions 
of intellect and character which take definite shapfe in 
clothes, mannerisms, physical habits, delicate shades of feel- 
ing, peculiar mental attitudes, moral decisions that could 
not be forecast; and similarly that psycho-physical situa- 
tion which results from the force of such things as home, 
family, friends, possessions ; and, more remotely, social rela- 
tions of innumerable kinds — all of which, while strictly ex- 
ternal to personality, nevertheless constitute its settings, its 
immediate fringes, and exercise some determining influence 
over what the man finally becomes mentally and morally. 1 
Physical personality can thus connote an apparent resume 
of the whole person. We should not be surprised to find 
spiritual elements creeping in. The reason is once more 
that man is an "unum ens per se." The most spiritualized 

1 This assertion is. of course, different from the loose modern view that a 
man's immediate environment is his personality "extended" or that he 
is that environment. While keeping the two spheres distinct we admit 
the close relation. 



32 THE IDEA OF PEBSONALITY. 

thought or volition is accompanied by organic modifications. 
What is not admitted, of course, is that personality can be 
reduced to merely physical manifestations of the body. The 
Scholastics would not say that the organism is the only 
ground of being, as M. Ribot does, 1 but that it is simply the 
physical basis of personality. The distinction is evident. 

Physical personality properly designates, therefore, all 
that may be perceived by an " outside view of man. ' ' But 
it is more than just that. It furnishes us with the first con- 
crete suggestions for the recognition of that permanent 
ground of variability in individuals that otherwise show 
fundamental similarities of structure and functioning. 2 Re- 
membering that the problem of personality in general is 
mainly one as to how and why men vary and how far these 
variations can be studied and reduced to practical principles 
of conduct that have not only a religious and ethical value, 
but a political, legal, and economic importance as well, the 
physical person will repay consideration to the extent that 
it indicates the solution of the many effective differences 
among men, that form the commonplaces of experience. 
Every one knows how, from the time of St. Augustine's 
great paragraphs on introspection, men have regarded cer- 
tain activities of other men as evidences for an inward per- 
sonal life. Some would even accuse the philosophers of 
having barely wrapped up these popular pieces of evidence 
in high-sounding language. "What is true is that, if there 
is such a thing at all as personality, we must be able to ob- 
serve its empirical foundation in the organism. 

The data connected with the physical person may be 
unified as a problem of individuality. What demands our 
attention first of all is that the physical person is an indi- 
vidual or "that which is undivided in itself, but distin- 
guished from others." 3 It will be recalled that the initial 
step of Scholasticism in deciding what constitutes a person 
was taken on the presumption that man is a genuine indi- 
vidual. The reason given is the existence of an internal di- 

1 Diseases of Personality, p. 85. 

2 That is, it offers the first indications for the Scholastic "hypostasis," taken 

in its most general sense S. Thomas, Summa, I, Q. 29, art. 2, ad. 1. 

3 "Individuum est illnd quod est in se indistinctum, so aliis vero distinc- 

tum." S. Thomas, Summa, I, Q. 29, art. 4, c. 



THE PHYSICAL PERSON. 33 



rective principle. It is our task now to justify that position 
more in detail by seeking to find out whether the principle 
of individuation is really internal. The significance of this 
question can be adequately grasped if we remember that to 
the thought of our day the causes of variability lie rather in 
the conditions to which each species, and each member of 
each species, has been exposed during several generations. 
According to this ideal, we should study conditions rather 
than men. Undoubtedly, organism and species, organism 
and environment cannot be separated or understood apart. 
In reproduction, heredity, and death, the individual shows 
itself as belonging to a wider organic whole. But there is 
danger of exaggerating the connection. Darwin himself 
admitted that there is a large class of variations, to be pro- 
visionally called spontaneous, that depend much more on the 
constitution of the organism than on the nature of the con- 
ditions to which it has been subjected. 1 Since Darwin's 
time we have been inclined to attach a great deal of im- 
portance to these spontaneous variations, and rightly. 2 It 
may well be questioned whether there is, or ever can be, one 
science of nature. 3 

Unfortunately, science has worked out the proximate 
causes of things without sufficient regard to the ultimate 
causes with which philosophy deals ; and, consequently, much 
has been missed. Thus, with reference to individuality 
there is an imposing array of data which plainly indicate 
that the individual has a very pronounced interest in its 
destiny and a very emphatic way of showing this interest. 
No system of external causation constitutes a completely 
sufficient explanation of this fact. Sex, race, inheritance, 
and environment, which have all been brought forth to ac- 
count for the phenomena of variation, are not able to bear 
all the facts. Sex has been frankly overrated. Many 
traits are not touched by it, and the variations within one 



1 The Descent of Man, 2nd ed., Philadelphia, p. 59. 

' Cfr. William James' Essay on Great Men and Their Environment in The 

Will to Believe, New York, 1911, pp. 221-224. 
* Professor J. Arthur Thompson has shown the questionableness of this 

scientific ideal. "7s There One Nature?" Hibbert Journal, Oct., 1911 ; 

Jan., 1912. 



34 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 



sex are hardly less than those between the sexes them- 
selves. Remote ancestry tells, us much with reference to phy- 
sical differences. Near ancestry seems to determine some- 
what intellectual and moral individuality. Environmental 
influences supplement both. Yet, in all cases, we have still 
to allow for an "original individuality" that makes indi- 
viduals, even in the same race, vary widely; that is due 
rather to original differences of endowment in the cellular 
structure from which individuals spring ; that restricts and 
shapes environmental forces, instead of being their mere 
effect. ' ' Hygiene, medicine, education, and all social forces 
have to reckon with original differences in men. Their 
aims, means, and methods must be adapted to fit, not one 
nature, but many." 1 

More positively, there are sufficiently well-known ex- 
amples of development that will depend on the unique char- 
acter of the individual. In the sphere of physiological ac- 
tivity, such are the formation of neural pathways through 
which sensory impulses may flow out over motor channels 
for the production of effective coordinated muscular move- 
ments; the determining by the organism itself whether a 
stimulus shall be repeated or not ; also what pathways shall 
in the first instance become established. Such are also the 
inhibition of irrelevant movements in the nervous system 
and the variations in the mechanism of habits Wherever 
we turn the phenomena are constantly pointing backwards 
to something further. It is so in the processes of secretion, 
growth, nervous excitation, muscular contraction, which are 
not simply mechanisms, but related activities of what may 
be provisionally called an "organic determination," which 
seems to account for the marvellous delicacy and interac- 
tion of the parts, and which would apparently decide what 
changes are to be made, what elements will enter into the 
change, and what will be the final state of the change. 

The modifying influence of individuality is even more 
strikingly exemplified in the organism as a psycho-physical 



1 Professor E. L. Thorndike, Individuality, p. 43. This whole work will re- 
pay a careful reading. 
' James Rowland Angell, Psychology, 4th ed., New York, 1918, pp. 66-73. 



THE PHYSICAL. PERSON. 35 



unit. In fact, it is impossible to study the ' ' synapse ' ' with- 
out seeing that consciousness may be changed, and be- 
haviour reversed, by the counter effort of the individual. 
Man is not merely an effect ; he is also a cause. Conscious- 
ness is never impartial in its response to the objects pre- 
sented. It is always primarily concerned with some partic- 
ular portion of the objective field which has for it a mean- 
ing through associations of innumerable sorts, and which is 
placed, classified, or recognized as vitally related to us 
through our experience. Thus, perception represents the 
point in which the past and present come together for the 
production of a new mental object, "the immediate, or- 
ganized, mental reaction of the individual upon his environ- 
ment. In it the world is presented as a system of relations ; 
not merely reflected as a disorganized mass of atoms and 
molecules, but constructed (better "shaped") by the various 
activities of attention into definite objects. The perceived 
thing is not simply the physically present vibrations ; it is 
these vibrations as they are interpreted by a psycho-phy- 
sical organism which expresses them to a nervous system al- 
ready affected by past experiences, that enable it to get only 
certain specific kinds of results from the present syn- 
thesis. ' n Like illustrations may be had in the juxtaposition 
of elements in the phenomenon of imagination; in the in- 
dividual peculiarities and preferences in the kinds of im- 
agery which we employ ; in the wide variation among people 
as to the materials which they use in their memory pro- 
cesses, and also as to the proficiency which they display in 
acquiring and retaining information; not to mention the 
coherent and efficient use of meanings in the conceptual pro- 
cess. 

In consequence of the foregoing, each life cycle is com- 
plete in itself. All the changes observable in man — changes 
of form, electrical changes, absorption of oxygen, modifica- 
tions of thought, volition and feeling — happen with seeming 
regard to a center of interests. Consciousness, on its mental 
side, is continually given over to the double process of tak- 
ing apart the various elements of experience into thoughts, 

1 J. R. Angell, op. cit., pp. 169-170. 



36 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

sensations, feelings and volitions and putting them together 
again in such a way that all the conscious processes of an 
individual enter as factors into the determination of sub- 
sequent and consequent activities. So, too, consciousness, 
on its physiological side, is the counterpart of the total mass 
of shifting tensions going on all over the cortex at any given 
moment. It is visual or auditory according as this tension 
is greatest in the occipital, or the temporal region. More- 
. over, in the picture of consciousness as the counterpart of a 
unified series of physiological tensions, we must not forget 
that the whole nervous system is in a measure involved. 
These tensions are constantly escaping through motor path- 
ways. Finally, ideational processes are often interjected 
between the sensation and the movement. 1 

The closed individuality of the psycho-physical organ- 
ism is now recognized as a concrete condition by most phy- 
siologists, psychologists, and sociologists of the saner type, 
despite the fact that the latter are generally more anxious 
than others to describe the cohesion in man as of an ex- 
tremely volatile kind. The trouble comes when we try to de- 
fine this ultimate unity. The majority of non-Scholastic 
writers have given up all hope of anything like a literal 
unity in man. The Self is to them an aggregate of "po- 
tential selves. ' ' The ' ' dominant self ' ' is simply the ' ' alge- 
braic sum" of the various activities making up the mind and 
body at any given instant, 2 It is a "coalition" after the 
fashion that M. Eibot calls the human person a "whole by 
coalition, the extreme complexity of which veils from us 
its origin, and the origin of which would remain impene- 
trable if the existence of elementary forms did not throw 
some light upon the mechanism of that fusion." 3 The 
"mechanism of that fusion" is precisely the point. Ad- 
mittedly a region about which for the most part we are 
poorly informed, it may still be maintained that up to the 
present no theory of the self as a "product of co-operation" 
has done more than give a metaphorical account of the 
actual complex situation. If the view of man as a cohesion 

1 J. R. Angell, op. tit., p. 54. 

* Arthur James Todd, Theories of Social Progress, New York, 1918, p. 23. 

8 Diseases of Personality, p. 3. 



THE PHYSICAL PERSON. 37 

of multitudinous selves has any real foundation we might 
expect that the perspective which it opens up would be veri- 
fied in the organism. In other words, any consistent scheme 
of personality would be true in all departments of human 
being. The only promising possibility for the theory under 
consideration is that which David Starr Jordan provokes 
when he designates the ego ' ' a co-ordination of nerve cells. ' n 
On the assumption that the single cells are conscious, we can 
pass easily to the idea of a * * colonial consciousness, ' ' which, 
even if it does identify the material basis of personality 
with the whole content of personality, has the merit of being 
more intelligible than the ordinary descriptions of "poten- 
tial selves." The difficulty is that the scope and signifi- 
cance of the single cell is largely one of physiology ; and the 
students of psychical life must wait on the findings of the 
physiologists, who are by no means inclined to go very fast 
as the following quotation from Robert Tigerstedt will 
show: 

"The more modern physiology progresses, the more 
clearly it is seen that the cell, or the elementary organism, 
as it is well named, represents the real ultimate in the body, 
not only morphologically but physiologically as well. Most 
elementary processes taking place in the living body show 
that the remarkable qualities of the living substance depend 
on more complex circumstances than exact investigation of 
nature in our time has been able to explain. Where 
investigation is sufficiently far advanced to admit of some 
theoretical inferences, it has become clear that the elemen- 
tary conditions for the activities of organs and tissues lie 
exactly in the activity of elementary organisms. I need 
scarcely emphasize here that no real theory, that is, no me- 
chanical explanation of the phenomena in question is given. 
When we reduce organic actions down to the activities of 
elementary organisms, we have not done anything more than 
just hinted at where the solution probably must be sought, 
without for all that having penetrated more deeply into it. ' ,2 

In the meantime, even if we should be able to reduce 

1 Footnotes to Evolution, New York, 1898, pp. 271-2. 

' Lehrbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, Leipzig, 1909, 5th ed., introd. 1-2. 



38 THE IDEA OF PEKSONALITY. 

man physically to a group of cells and, psychically, to a 
bundle of habits, memories and thoughts, we should still 
have the fact of complexity, which, as Alfred Binet testi- 
fies, is as big a problem in the unicellular organism as it is 
in man. 1 Must not the internal functioning of the indi- 
vidual as a whole, making the organism live, feel, and know 
as a whole, enter into our conception of the basis of self- 
hood? That is the perplexing situation which made the 
(Scholastics call a person, in the first instance, a substance ; 
a mode of existence by which beings remain numerically 
and identically the same, the subject of all accidental varia- 
tions and changes going on wthin them — entities complete 
in themselves, and distinguished from all others, and ca- 
pable of resisting all ordinary forces tending to destroy 
them. It is a perplexity that is not removed, either, by 
conceiving the ground of unity as transient instead of per- 
manent, and the person as "a bulge in the organic whole" 
instead of the organic whole itself. 

It is safe to say that the physical self is not only the 
source of our earliest ideas of self, but that it suffices also 
as a bond of communication for all the ordinary relations of 
life. This does not mean that the physical self is adequate 
to meet all the demands made upon personality, but simply 
that it is the concrete expression, as well as the concrete 
basis, of self. A man commonly adverts to his personality 
chiefly in terms of protection and maintenance for his body. 
Outside this objective, he is interested in preserving normal 
and prosperous conditions in his family, in acquiring pos- 
sessions, in having enjoyable intercourse with friends. Per- 
sonality will be manifested in the attitudes taken in all these 
concerns, but not much of the inner worth of personality 
will be revealed. Even where our mental and moral equip- 
ment is derived almost exclusively from the unquestioned 
authority that resides in parents and teachers, there need 
be little exercise of the deep inward forces of personality. 
But no life is without its moments of keen remorse or high 
aspiration that serve to illuminate all that we are and all 
that we may be. Where we are thus under the stimulus of 

1 The Psychic Life of Micro-Orgamsms, (Open Court), 1897. 



THE PHYSICAL PERSON. 39 



noble purposes and ideals, searching introspection is forced 
on us; and we do not require dignified scientific evidence 
telling us how little girls often scold their fingers as if they 
were things apart, how the infant ascertains only gradually 
the topography of its physical organism, 1 in order to per- 
ceive that the ideas of self deduced from the physical per- 
son are defective. Similarly, as sympathy broadens and 
the bonds of association are strengthened by love, we ask 
a more serviceable concept than that of mere bodily presence 
and activity. 

The whole history of progressive thought, insofar as it 
can be stated in terms of personality, may be described as 
a constant effort to correct the inaccuracies and shortcom- 
ings of the "outside view of man," by an ever-increasing 
recognition of the spiritual elements of personality. Bef- 
erence has already been made to the havoc created in re- 
ligious philosophy by carrying this very insufficient notion 
of the human self over into the Divine existence. Legal 
theories, expressive of individual interests, were also found- 
ed on the concept of the physical self. The consequence 
was that not only was the integrity of the physical person 
regarded as nothing more than a group-interest, but no pro- 
vision was made for a long time for such other imperative 
protections as the immunity of the mind and the nervous 
system from direct or indirect injury, and for freedom from 
any annoyance which interferes with mental poise and com- 
fort/ Likewise, the first statements of economic opinion 
were formulated without any apparent suspicion that a 
workman Was anything more than a producing machine, so 
many foot-pounds of energy. In a word, the true under- 
standing of personality is grasped, only when its physical 
basis is supplemented by the more spiritual facts of psy- 
chical life and when these are properly appreciated and esti- 
mated. 

'There is no intention of disparaging the work of such investigations as G. 
Stanley Hall exemplified, for instance, in "Some Aspects of the Early 
Sense of Self." Amer. Jour, of Psychol. 9 :351-82. 

5 Roscoe Pound, The Interests of Personality, Harvard, Law Review, Vol. 
XXVIII, No. 4, p. 356. Here it is not denied that the concern of the 
law is strictly "with social interests, since it is the social interest in 
securing the individual interest that must determine the law to secure 
it." lb., p. 344. 



CHAPTEE FOUE 

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PEBSON. 

The psychological person is a provisional name for that 
permanent group of conscious facts which all must recog- 
nize within themselves. Just as in the case of the physical 
person, we must beware of isolating the psychical self. The 
latter is not confined to mental manifestations alone. It is 
accompanied in our consciousness of it by bodily feelings 
and images. So far, however, as its operations are mainly, 
or altogether, mental, it shows itself, according to the 
Scholastic view, as substantial in the identity remaining 
throughout all changing states ; as simple in the indivisible 
unity of its activities ; and as spiritual in the character and 
kinds of many of its energies, such energies as thought, 
which is free and spontaneous. These qualities of unity, 
identity, and spirituality constitute the problem of the 
psychological person. It will be noted again that there is 
no hint that the person is "a persistent core of matter or 
thought." All that is sought is an inference from mental 
phenomena that each of us is a complete individual nature 
subsisting independently and incommunicably, and endowed 
with rationality, which finally gives to the notion of person 
the grounds for a specific difference. 

Obviously, the intimate knowledge of our own nature, 
implied in this summary, can be the result only of a long and 
carefully conducted analysis of our own activities, supple- 
mented by the facts of external observation, and of deduc- 
tions derived from the character of these activities. The 
concepts produced by this process afford a technical and 
highly specialized knowledge of the self, not possessed by 
the majority of persons and not influencing, as knowledge, 
though it must, of course, as reality, the ordinary conduct 
of men. This is what was meant when it was said that in- 
dividuals, as a rule, apparently live out their existence on 
the basis of physical personality. At the same time, since 



42 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 



the organism is properly a psycho-physical organism, it is 
impossible that the human individual should be without 
some immediate apprehension of his own ' ' abiding unity or 
sameness throughout incessantly changing states, in the 
temporal series of his conscious activities. ' n This implicit 
knowledge of the self in the concrete is direct and intuitive, 
and requires for its formation nothing but the evidence of 
common experience. That beings maintain themselves as 
practically one and identical, is quite beyond cavil. Every 
one recognizes in his body, despite the changes which time 
works, the same old organic possibilities and weaknesses, 
and the same peculiarities of structure and functioning. 
Every one, too, can detect resemblances and differences in 
his consciousness of today and his consciousness of five 
years ago. 

Such direct knowledge of the self is, naturally, acquired 
from within and is subject to gradual development after a 
fashion described by Father Maher in the following para- 
graph: "As thoughts of pleasures and pains repeated in 
the past and expected in the future grow more distinct, the 
dissimiliarity between these and the permanent abiding self 
comes to be more fully realized. Passing emotions of fear, 
anger, vanity, pride, or sympathy, accentuate the difference. 
But most probably it is the dawning sense of the power to 
resist and overcome rising impulse, and the dim nascent 
consciousness of responsibility, which lead up to the final 
revelation, until at last in some reflective act of memory or 
choice, or in some vague effort to understand the oft-heard 
"I," the great truth is manifested to him; and the child 
enters, as it were, into possession of his personality and 
knows himself as a self-conscious being. The Ego does not 
create but discovers itself. In Jouffroy's felicitous phrase, 
it "breaks its shell," and finds that it is a personal agent 
with an existence and individuality of its own, standing 
henceforward alone in opposition to the universe." 2 The 
self is then distinguished as the cause or subject of the 
states, and the states as the modification of the self. All 



1 P. Coffey, Ontology or the Theory of Being, London, 1914, p. 274. 
2 M. Maher, Psychology, p. 363. 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSON. 43 

that would be further required to make this conception of 
the self a working idea would be the quasi-objective view of 
our own personality as one of a number of similar person- 
alities around us in the world, a view which would "gather 
jnto itself the history of my past life — the actions of my 
childhood, boyhood, youth, and later years. Interwoven 
with them all is the image of my bodily organism, and clust- 
ering around are a fringe of recollections of my disposi- 
tions, habits, and character, of my hopes and regrets, of my 
resolutions and failures, along with a dim consciousness of 
my position in the minds of other selves." 1 

The picture here presented is undoubtedly an accurate 
account of the actual situation. But because it is necessary 
both that men should learn to appreciate the true inner 
worth of the Ego, and that educators should have fit terms 
to express its worth, additional data from philosophical in- 
trospection should be brought to bear on the problem. Since 
self -consciousness is the chief instrument of this investiga- 
tion, the question is: what does self-consciousness reveal? 
It reveals, say the Scholastics, a single something more in- 
cessantly present than anything else, the source and sup- 
port of all that goes on within us. Non-Scholastic psy- 
chologists, generally, affirm that it does no such thing. 
From Locke to James in English philosophy, for example, 
we meet with an unbroken line of assertion to the effect that 
we must "find a place for all the experiential facts, unen- 
cumbered by any hypothesis save that of passing states of 
mind." It is thus easy to see why personality has been 
made synonymous with consciousness. We do not obtain, 
it is held, by reflexive consciousness the notion of an identi- 
cally persistent substance. We are rather all "bundles of 
habits, tendencies, contradictions, oppositions, of every 
variety and shade, texture, and capacity of combination. 
The great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world 
has more or less of a counterpart within us." 2 

The fundamental tenet of phenomenalism is that mind 
is only sensations and the possibilities of sensations. It 
may well be doubted whether, even if this doctrine were 

1 /&., p. 365. 

J Arthur James Todd, Theories of Progress, N. Y,, 1918, pp. 23-24. 



44 THE IDEA OF PEKSONALITY. 

verified, we could still regard ourselves as simply a suc- 
cession of conscious states. We must remember that a cer- 
tain unified persistency is as much a prerequisite of sense- 
knowledge as of any admittedly higher form of cognition. 
This is shown by the fact that the immediate response in 
sensation, as well as in perception, is the consciousness of a 
single object. Despite the great number of sensory nerves 
that are being stimulated by an object, we perceive it, not as 
an aggregate of qualities, but as a unit, a whole, which we 
can, if necessary, analyze into its parts. There is, on our 
side, a certain unitary interest in the thing which binds its 
members into a single whole. Moreover, equation between 
the past and present is an elementary necessity of all con- 
scious life. There must always be the habitual reaction due 
to the influence of past experience. It is this baffling fact 
that there would be no phenomena if there were not some- 
thing more than the phenomena, that forces us to seek a 
residue which the, workings of the phenomena indicate, 
which no phenomenon, no series of phenomena, explains. 
"We must be prepared, however, for the realization that 
whatever theory is adopted, it will fail to satisfy everybody. 
But let us have a more virile explanation than that given 
by Locke or by Mill, who was more allied to the former than 
he was to Hume. 1 It is a poor expedient to concede to the 
objective order what you are ashamed of in the order of 
thought. Equally certain is it that the conclusions of David 
Hume and the entire school of strict Associanists are also 
unsatisfactory., 2 To speak of conscious states as if they 
were chemical elements, united by laws of affinity, is to do 
violence to the psychological conditions. The weakness of 
this whole traditional philosophy was never more emphati- 
cally displayed than in the shifting position which William 



John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Bk. I, c. 4, sect. 

18; Bk. II, c. 13, sect. 19; c. 23, sect. 1, note; Bk. IV, c. 4, sect. 12. 

J. S. Mill, System of Logic, Bk. 1, c. 3, sect. 3, 6, 7, 9; c. 6, sect. 3; 

Examination of Sir WilUam Hamilton's Philosophy, 4th ed., pp. 247 

seq., 263. 
1 Hume was the great opponent of mental substances. Berkeley had already 

done away with bodily substances. Hume's views may be had partially 

in the Treatise on Human Nature, Bk. I, Pt. 4, sects. 2, 3, 5. Also the 

Chapter on Personal Identity in the same work. 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSON. 45 

James tried to occupy, midway between the Schoolmen and 
the Associationists. He protested, on the one hand, that a 
world of " pure experience" needs no such bedding as ''sub- 
stances and selves. \ n On the other hand, in the mental life, 
he admitted that ■ ' the coming of the thought, when the brain 
processes occur, has some sort of ground in the nature of 
things." 2 There is the crux of the problem; and it is not 
surprising that, if the whole chapter on the Consciousness of 
Self in James' "Psychology" means anything, it is that 
Thought and Self, instead of being permanent, are instan- 
taneous substances. 

An accurate appreciation of the functioning of self- 
consciousness makes us aware that what is disclosed is 
neither just a mass of sensations and feeling, nor yet, at 
least immediately, the substantial existence of the person. 
For reasons already indicated, there is no act of reflection 
that shows the Ego as merely ' ' a feeling or sensibility, mod- 
ified in innumerable ways, by influences which (it does) not 
originate." 3 There is noticed at the same time a group- 
ing of modifications into a "sentient unity," which itself 
needs explanation. Thus, it ought to clear that self-con- 
sciousness compels the recognition of a permanent some- 
thing, persisting the same throughout the succession of im- 
pressions. This, however, is not a matter of direct sensory 
observation, but of inference transcending the sphere of 
sense. The validity of this inference will depend, of course, 
on the strength of the distinction between intellect and sense, 
to be discussed presently. But assuming that the phe- 
nomena do not constitute the whole of our mental life ; that 
feelings, sensations, and impulses do not hang in a vacuum, 
we may proceed tentatively with the Scholastic interpreta- 
tion of self-consciousness, remembering that we only require 
the verification of a faculty beyond sense to render the in- 
terpretation solid. 

What is revealed to us first of all in our various opera- 



1 A World of Pure Experience, Journ. of Phil., Psych, and 8c. Methods, 
1904, p. 533 et seq. Pure experience is defined as the "original flux of 
life before reflection has categorised it" ; A Phiralistio Universe, p. 348. 

1 Psychology, New York, 1890, p. 343. 

s Thos. Davidson, Educ. Rev. XX; 327. 



46 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

tions, say the Schoolmen, is mind. 1 Further introspection 
manifests mind as the abiding principle amid its evanescent 
states. Additional study of the analyzing and classifying 
powers of mind makes us aware that mind is the activity of 
a simple, spiritual substance, termed the soul, which, in 
Scholastic thought, is the basis of personal identity. Soul 
and body, though distinct, are one substance. The soul is not 
the person. It is at once the substantial form of the body 
and the physical principle of permanence and unity, of life 
and thought* 2 

Against; the Scholastic position has been brought a 
group of facts that have come into prominence during re- 
cent years and that tend to disprove the absolute unity and 
identity of personality. Such are the facts of amnesia, dis- 
integration of memory in old age, illusions, hypnotic sleep, 
alternating selves, mediumships, and possessions. For- 
merly designated " diseases of personality," they are now 
considered as no more than exaggerated instances of the 
normal instability of the person. But as the traditional 
conception of personality is real; the modern, empirical, 
i. e., self-consciousness, the latter may be seriously affected 
without really changing the former. Thus, the disintegra- 
tion of memory in old age is very evidently an instance of 
the relation of the brain to thought, and this is perfectly in 
accord with a real personality, which, as a substance, is 
capable of relative growth and decline. On the other hand, 
abstract ideas, which depend so largely for their existence in 
our thought upon the words which we use to express them, 
persist by virtue of the law of habit, and any disintegration 
of the habit will superinduce a suspension of the power of 
thought. All the operations of the human ego are solidary, 
interdependent ; and this interdependence, this solidarity is 
perfectly capable of being interpreted spiritually as indicat- 

1 "Ad primam cognitionem de mente habendam sufficit ipsa mentis praesen- 
tia, quae est principium actus, ex quo mens percipit seipsam; et ideo 
dicitur se cognoscere per suam praesentiam. Sed ad secundam cogni- 
tionem de mente habendam non sufficit eius praesentia; sed requirtur 
diligens et subtilis inquisitio: unde et multi naturam animae ignorant, 
et multi circa naturam animae erraverunt." St. Thomas, Sum/ma, I, Q. 
87, art. I. 

* "Ex anima et corpore constituitur in unoquoque nostrum duplex unitas, 
naturae et personae." lb. Ill, Q. 2, art. I, ad 2. Also, 7ft. I, Q. 75, art. 
4, c. 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSON. 47 



ing the objective, not the subjective, dependence of the mind 
upon the organism for the matter of reflection. Other phe- 
nomena, like hypnotic sleep, denoting profound disturb- 
ances of the empirical personality, leave the real personal- 
ity untouched, changing only the consciousness had of it. 
These phenomena are related to such cases as hysteria 
where fundamental cleavages of the memory-processes take 
place, by virtue of which one set of experiences becomes en- 
tirely severed from the rest of experience and serves for 
the focus of what is called a new ' ' personality, ' ' but is really 
no more than a changed consciousness of one's self. Il- 
lusions, similarly, may be regarded as primarily disturb- 
ances of the emotional processes connected with the famili- 
arity feeling. Insanity, which affects the higher levels of 
personality, and alternating selves, though constituting a 
serious difficulty, cannot be proved to imply more than the 
eclipse, total or partial, of the power of self-recognition. 
To one who holds that the self is identical with the con- 
sciousness had of it, all these difficulties are insuperable. 
But to the accepter of a real self, behind all the varying 
states of consciousness, a man does not cease to be himself, 
or really become another, when his ideas change or grow 
diseased. 

It was pointed out that the ability to detect a substan- 
tial existence behind mental phenomena in the consciousness 
of self demands an intellectual principle in man. In fact, 
it is the possession of this principle, another name for the 
rational soul, that makes, in Scholastic philosophy, the sub- 
sisting individual a "person" as distinct from a subsisting 
"thing." Hence, St. Thomas writes: "For the nature of 
each thing is shown by its operation. Now the proper op- 
eration of man, as man, is to understand ; because he there- 
by surpasses all other animals Man must therefore de- 
rive his species from that which is the principle of this op- 
eration. But the species of anything is derived from its 
form. It follows, therefore, that the intellectual principle 
is the proper form of man." 1 * The term "rational" does 
not apply simply to the reasoning processes of the mind. 
The Scholastics expressly opposed that restriction when 

1 Summa, 1, Q. 76, art. I, c. 



48 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

Eichard of St. Victor attempted to alter Boethius' definition 
by substituting ' ' intellectual ' ' for ' ' rational. ' n A man does 
not lose his personality when he loses the power of normal 
reasoning, although his personality is markedly affected, as 
in the case of paranoia, where the intellect of the patient 
is apparently vigorous, but dominated by delusions. In- 
deed, the emotions, a man's hates and loves, and the like, 
are more concretely manifestative of personality than the 
intellect. Reason must be used, at least in the beginning 
of explanation, in the sense that it is the full implication and 
significance of all other conscious processes. It involves 
perception and memory, imagination and conception, as well 
as the highly abstract and systematized forms that are 
usually meant by reasoning in the narrower and more pre- 
cise use of the word. 

The great function of reasoning, then, is [ 'purposive 
thinking. ' ' It is this that really distinguishes man from the 
brutes. It involves the recognition of problems and plans, 
whether these be transient and insignificant, or interests 
covering the length and conduct of a life-time ; and the solu- 
tion of the problems and the realization of the plans through 
the selection of ideas and the manipulation of these ideas 
in accordance with the purpose that we have in view. Pur- 
posive thinking is properly the work of the intellect ; and, in 
its higher phases — abstraction, generalization, relational 
judgment, and inference — of the intellect alone. But it also 
brings together, localizes, and gives a value to all the other 
mental modes — perception, imagination, memory, and the 
rest — and so in a measure includes them. It is because we 
perceive the importance of our past experience in some 
present perplexity, that memory has worth. So, too, does 
will cooperate in so far as it transforms an idea into a pur- 
pose, keeps the mind fixed on that purpose, and directs all 
its activities to the fulfillment of that purpose. In a word, 
reason is intuitive as well as discursive; and it is the in- 
tuitive reason that is the primate of all our faculties. That a 
man should be able to apprehend the relations in a problem, 
to separate ideas from sensations and perceptions is the 

1 Suarez, De Trimitate, Bk. 1, cap. 1, sect. 7. 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL, PERSON. 49 

great mental achievement in the building up of knowledge 
and the controlling of conduct that makes man to a chief 
extent the arbiter of his own destiny, or more simply, a per- 
son. 

Such an effective expression of mind is not duplicated, 
so far as we can see, among animals. Many of the acts of 
animals that have elicited the most unbounded admiration 
are undoubtedly purely instinctive. It seems probable, also, 
that many of these instincts are unconscious and just as 
truly reflex as the most uncontrollable human reflexes. Be- 
sides, there are any number of animal acts, apparently sug- 
gesting mind, but consisting really in associating certain 
impulses or acts with certain objects or situations. 1 The 
original associating of the correct elements may have come 
about more or less accidentally and is certainly often the 
result of many random trials. In the light of our present 
knowledge, it is probable that the great mass of seemingly 
intelligent acts which animals perform, apart from instinc- 
tive acts, are of this variety and therefore involve nothing 
more elaborate than the association of certain types of situa- 
tion with certain motor impulses. Until it can be shown 



Mr. Bigelow, Editor of the Guide to Nature (Sound Beach, Conn., Feb., 
1918), offers some sensible observations on the supposed geometrical 
ability of the honey-bee. He writes : "First, the bee does not voluntar- 
ily make hexagons. The hexagons are the result of physical laws. 
They have nothing to do with the intent of the bee, nor has the intent 
of the bee anything to do with them. Secondly, they are not perfect. 
Careful measurement of the various cells has shown that there is varia- 
tion, due to difference in size of the adjoining cells. At one time it was 
thought that there could be no better standard of measurement than 
these cells. The honey-bee deserves not one particle of credit for mak- 
ing a beautiful hexagon. All that she does is to make a cylinder of 
wax, and a mighty crude one at that. Bees in series — that is, one 
after another — take the little plates of wax secreted from between the 
body scales and pack them into circles as crude as a child would make 

when she makes her mud pies The bee heaps up these pellets one 

after another, and the action of a physical law, and that action alone, 
does the rest. She is as little responsible for the hexagonal shape as 
she is for the movements of a planet. Through unthinkable ages honey- 
bees have been making crude cylinders of wax, but they have never 
yet been able to make a hexagon. , . . . .The edge of the honeycomb, built 
wholly by bees, is never hexagonal nor angular. The side is a curve 
and the cells immediately on that curve are spherical at their bottom 
and circular at their rim. All solitary bees work in circles. He that 
gives the matter consideration will naturally feel that the hexagons of 
the honey-bee's comb are associated with something beyond and outside 
biological law." 



50 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

that animals grasp relations, form concepts, and employ 
association of similars, we mnst deny them the significant 
and distinctive features of human thinking. Animal con- 
sciousness, to all observation, is much more exclusively and 
continuously monopolised by mere awareness of bodily con- 
ditions than the human consciousness ; it is much more pre- 
occupied by recurrent and uncontrolled impulses, and much 
more rarely invaded in any definite manner by independent 
images of past experience. 1 

To say that the nervous system of the higher animals 
seems to afford all the necessary basis for the appearance 
and development of the simpler forms of rational conscious- 
ness, and that the only difference in these processes, as 
compared with those of man, of which we can speak dog- 
matically, and with entire confidence, is the difference in 
complexity and elaboration, is to raise a hope that does not 
afford much opportunity of being realized in psychological 
science. "The dilemma," writes Professor James, "in re- 
gard to the nervous system seems, in short, to be of the fol- 
lowing kind. We may construct one that will react infal- 
liby and certainly, but it will then be capable of reacting 
to very few changes in the environment — it will fail to be 
adapted to all the rest. We may, on the other hand, con- 
struct a nervous system potentially adapted to respond to 
an infinite variety of minute features in the situation ; but 
its fallibility will then be as great as its elaboration. We 
can never be sure that its equilibrium will be upset in the ap- 
propriate direction. In short, a high brain may do many 
things, and may do each of them at a very slight hint. But 
its hair-trigger organization makes of it a happy-go-lucky, 
hit-or-miss affair. It is as likely to do the crazy as the sane 
thing at any given moment. A low brain does few things, 
and in doing them perfectly forfeits all other use. The per- 
formances of a high brain are like dice thrown forever on 
a table. Unless they be loaded, what chance is there that 
the highest number will turn up oftener than the lowest?" 2 

1 For this entire section on animal consciousness, Angell, Psychology, pp. 

296-300, 341-345. 

2 Psychology, New York, Vol. I, p. 140. Also, Bergson, Creative Evolu- 

tion, p. 263. 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSON. 51 



The Scholastics were not unaware of the parallelism ex- 
isting between physiological activity and conscious mani- 
festation from sensation to cognition. It was this connec- 
tion, insistently perceived, that led more than one School- 
man to adopt the notion of the forma corporeitatis. 1 Mod- 
ern thinkers may not feel inclined, in the present state of 
psychological research, to imitate the Schools in the nice 
clean-cut distinctions with reference to the faculties, al- 
though to abandon all distinction, with James and Bergson, 
is to fly to a fallacy no less pernicious than that of separa- 
tism. We perceive more clearly now, what the Schoolmen 
indeed perceived but did not fully develop, that faculties 
merge into one another with surprising complexity. But 
after all, it comes to the same thing. If we say that men 
differ from animals as intellect differs from sense, we affirm 
under another form the fact that men vary essentially from 
animals in their ability to do purposive thinking. The rad- 
ical principle of the latter is the intellect, although it im- 
plies more than mere intellectual operation and covers the 
processes of sensation, perception, imagination, and mem- 
ory as well. The intellective principle in man is one. 

But in whatever language we try to meet the demands 
of the psychological situation, we may feel certain that there 
is in human consciousness a sphere of activity which brutes 
have not reached, and, in the light of all possible methods 
of investigation, cannot reach. The fashion of levelling 
down the mental powers of man to the plane of brute con- 
sciousness, initiated on the data of comparative anatomy, 
seems now farther away from realization than ever. 
Comparative anatomy is sensible and convincing so long as 
it keeps to bones, blood-vessels, and the nervous system and 
internal viscera. But it exceeds its limits when it rambles 
off into explanations of man's nature, origin, and destiny. 2 

1 Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet. Ill, 16;, Duns Scotus, Be Rerum Principio, 

Q. 8, art. 4. 

2 For the Scholastic distinction between Intellect and Sense, St. Thomas, Be 

Anima, Lib. Ill, 1, 7 ; Contra Gentiles, Lib. II, c. 66 ; St. George Mivart, 
On Truth, c. XV ; Balmez, Fundamental Philosophy, Bk. IV. The or- 
dinary materials of this treatment may be found, under various aspects 
in J. L. Perrier, The Revival of Scholastic Philosophy, New York, 1909, 
pp. 100-121 ; M. Maher, Psychology, pp. 231-354, 443-545 ; L. J. Walker, 
Theories of Knowledge, N. Y., 1910, pp. 391-418. 



52 THE IDEA OF PEKSONALITY. 

Of all the rational operations of the human soul, one 
of the most significant for a true concept of person is un- 
doubtedly free-will. It cannot be expected that we shall im- 
pose upon these few pages the burden of a controversy with 
which philosophy has been occupied since systematic think- 
ing first began. If we accept our consciousness for what 
it seems to be, then it appears clearly enough that there are 
moments of deliberate decision when we choose freely; and 
this testimony is backed by the further recognition of re- 
sponsibility and consequent feelings of satisfaction or re- 
morse. 1 But it is precisely on this point, more than on any 
other, that we are told that we cannot take our conscious- 
ness for what it seems, but that we must consider, with Mill, 
internal determining motives expressed in terms of pleasure 
or pain ; or, with Herbert Spencer, the uniform causation of 
all things ; or, with Dr. Maudsley and G. H. Lewes, the in- 
exorable conditioning of the mind by some definite mole- 
cular change in the substance of the organism; or, wiith 
Buckle, the changes in the surrounding society/ Certainly 
the determinists are at no loss for weapons with which they 
hope to put their opponents to inglorious rout. 

It is rather disconcerting to be told that if we could ex- 
ercise free-will in such an apparently simple matter as walk- 
ing down the street, we should be throwing the universe out 
of gear. John Fiske was positively terrified at the pros- 
pect, and wrote a glowing chapter revealing free-will as dis- 
rupting the world order and pulling down "the cardinal 
principles of ethics, politics, and jurisprudence. ' ' 3 One can- 
not fail to be surprised at the naive devotion of the deter- 
minists to the dogma, inherited from the great rationalists 
of the eighteenth century, that the universe is a mechanical 
contrivance in which nothing can happen except in absolute 
accordance with the eternal and unalterable laws of me- 
chanics. Not even the prof oundest respect for that ' ' age of 
reason" can make us shut our eyes to the fact that the ac- 

1 Every one can recognize here the gist of the common argument of indeter- 

minists, Scholastic or not. Cfr. H. Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, Bk. I, 
c. 5, sect. 2, 1st ed. 

2 Mill, Examination, 2nd ed., p. 505: Spencer, Principles of Psychology, I, 

503; Buckle, History of Civilization, in England, pp. 24-30. 
* Cosmic Philosophy, Pt. II, c. 17. 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL, PERSON. 53 



count which science keeps with the world is far from 
closed. 1 Meanwhile, determinists must be annoyed by the 
prospect that, no matter how much science may discover, no 
matter how much physiology and psychology may evolve, 
individual biographies, as "William James laconically re- 
marks, ' ' will never be written in advance. ' n 

Will as a free power means simply the capability of self- 
determination. Whatever else may be said against free- 
will, it is not a self-starting faculty. It has to be acted 
upon before coming into action itself. In fact, it is nothing 
else than the capacity of inflecting, specifying, directing, 
determining, and applying received motions. The idea that 
it implies a "miraculous agency without antecedents" 
would have been as repugnant to St. Thomas as it was to 
Mr. Bain. 3 

General considerations reveal the presence of this pow- 
er of self-determination. So long as we remain on the 
physiological level, it is a matter not difficult to prove. What 
can be verified for perception, imagination, the regulation 
of movement, is true in a more striking way of attention and 
the formation of habits. Without some positive guiding 
principle attention would be distributed evenly all over con- 
sciousness — an impossible condition. Of course, attention 
is sometimes constrained from the outside, as in cases of 
great sensory disturbances, insistent ideas, or intense ex- 
periences of the emotional kind. But we are equally aware 
of many instances where selection is positive and internal, 
and this is the selection that really counts. It prevents 
our being at the perpetual mercy of our sporadic ideas. So 
too, the formation of habits is an absolutely meaningless 
process, unless the individual has some directive power ; and 
the breaking off of habits acquired — the overcoming of syn- 
aptic resistance — is a fine instance of self-determination. 

Here, then, we have a kind of inner activity which no- 
body denies. What is especially objectionable in the inner 
activity which we associate with free volition? Determin- 

1 The Contingency of the Laws of Nature, Emile Boutroux, written 1876, 

6th ed., 1907, Eng. Tr. Chicago, 1916. 
1 Psychology. N. Y., Vol. II, p. 576, note. 
3 Summa, I, Q. 105, art. 4. 



54 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

ists do not deny that there is a phenomenon " called free 
effort which seems to breast the tide"; bnt they deny that 
it ever really breasts the tide, it is simply ' ' a portion of the 
tide." 1 Indeterminists say that volition follows thought; 
that thought is not simply the chain- like succession of one 
idea after another ; that thinking often involves several pos- 
sibles which require the effort of further consideration, and 
later of volition, to settle the matter. Hence the contro- 
versy. Inner activity that is determinable meets with no 
opposition. Inner activity that is independently variable 
must be denied in the name of physiology, psychology, and 
the peace of the world. But if we accept, as the Scholastics 
do, the immateriality of thought, we must not only refuse to 
identify the thinking process with the material concomit- 
ants, but we must also regard thought as accompanied by a 
power that implies effort 

Once we grant the indeterminate character of attention 
and deliberation, it is an easy matter to concede that consent 
is_also unfixed beforehand. There still remains the possi- 
bility, of course, that what seems to be the effort in an act 
of volition is nothing more than the resultant of previous 
interests and associations that are lost sight of in our con- 
sciousness of the proximate act of volition. Yet, even here, 
we are conscious at times of acting in direct opposition to 
the influences of training, the recognized traditions of en- 
vironment, and to the current of internal impulses, habits, 
or what not else. The whole trouble in the free-will con- 
troversy is the misconception of the will as a self-starting 
faculty. It is conceived of as something that acts inde- 
pendently — a power capable of coming into action without 
any antecedent cause. The current objections of the deter- 
minists refute this false conception of the will. They do 
not touch the Scholastic position which regards the will, not 
as a faculty, but as the property of a faculty. By which the 
Schoolmen meant that the will has to be moved by interests, 
motives, the complex activities going on within the self ; and 
that after being moved by these it is capable of accepting or 
rejecting the motions received. The freedom of the will 

1 William James, Psychology, Vol. II, p. 574. 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PEBSON. 55 

comes into play under the influence of these swaying motives 
and interests, which are the conditions under which its pow- 
er of self-determination is exercised. Correct the deter- 
minist's misconception of the will and freedom, and all his 
objections to the existence of this faculty become harmless 
illustrations of its actual manner of working. 1 

The worth of those aspects of personality, deduced from 
psychological introspection, has been associated in the past 
more with moral and religious conduct than with the other 
activities of life. This has been due largely to the absorb- 
ing belief in immorality and the attempt to place conscience 
beyond the vicissitudes of economic, political, and legal con- 
ditions. It is no fault of philosophers, of course, if men 
have withdrawn the notions of soul and conscience to the re- 
gion of frail ideals and dreamy aspirations. But what we 
need now are presentations that will reestablish conscience 
in laws, in states, and in the industrialism of modern com- 
munities. We are sick of all the expediency and material- 
ism that has come with "wealth, idleness, fat peace, and 
religious indifference." We are sicker still of all the talk 
of personality in terms of birth, wages, and voting. Un- 
doubtedly, the full realization of personality will always de- 
mand, as a prior condition, a situation where the causes of 
poverty, disease, and crime are reduced to a minimum. But 
we must remember that the things which eugenics, hygiene, 
and democratic government represent are not the whole of 
the problem of man's happiness, which must consist now, as 
in the days of Aristotle, in the free and complete expression 
of his rational nature. We have had some experience with 
exclusively material aims and methods, and we know that 
they evolve a self-manifestation that is nothing more than 
"gross selfishness." Materialism inevitably leads to insti- 
tutionalism and the dehumanizing of the individual. And 
so we have today "the bloated empires enclosing and stifling 
countless nationalities ; the vast financial aggregates reach- 
ing out into every industrial center and money-capitol of the 
world; the bloodless and inhuman industrial and commer- 
cial trust and combinations on the one hand, the subter- 
ranean ramifications of a sinister 'Internationalism' in 

1 S. Thomas, Summa, I, Q. 105, art. 4. 



56 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

unionized labor on the other. " * ' In some way return must 
be made to the living units of human scale that made the 
guilds and communes, the parishes and city-states, the or- 
ders of chivalry, the universities of the Middle Ages, living 
signs of the nearest approach man has yet made, through 
his many inventions, to a sound, wholesome and righteous 
organization of society." 1 To have men once more in a 
"human scale in human associations" we must translate the 
spiritual values of personality to the various departments 
of life. Some attempt is made in this direction in the en- 
suing chapters. 

1 Ralph Adams Cram, The Great Thousand Years and Ten Years After, Bos- 
ton, 1918, pp. 64-65. 



CHAPTER FIVE 

RELIGIOUS PERSONALITY. 

Religious personality, psychologically considered, is 
the consciousness of our relation to God as person to per- 
son. Its practical expression is conscience. Its effect is 
the recognition of an inner, inviolable worth in man. Its 
social value consists in the definite and tangible form that 
it gives to the idea of liberty ; an idea which the religion of 
Christ especially fostered, through the definite revealed 
knowledge which it brought of the plans of God in man's 
regard. 

Few will deny that the records of religious progress 
show that the belief in the possibility of communion between 
the creature and the Deity has resulted in the conception of 
religious activity as being not only the foundation, but the 
one clear example, of true freedom and unhampered personal 
assertion. An exaggerated sense of the superiority of every- 
thing modern has led to our underrating the spiritual atti- 
tudes of primitive religions. There is always, of course, 
the difficulty of verification. What knowledge we possess of 
such institutions as totemism and ancestor-worship, for in- 
stance, indicates that the individual was admitted not in his 
private capacity and on his own merits, but because of his 
social status and obligations. Still, no matter how so- 
cialized religion ever became, the individual did feel the 
need of approaching the gods on his own initiative. 1 Be- 
sides, it is hard to conceive that community worship went 
on without any of those internal sentiments that would give 
significance to individual participation. That the reli- 
gious spirit was not dominated exclusively by external mo- 
tives and was not solely a corporate matter, is suggested, 
perhaps, by certain striking facts of contemporary observa- 
tion in lower religions. Thus, ' ' among the Kamtchatkans, 
if a man declares that his personal divinity has in a dream 

1 F. B. Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religions, London, 1896, p. 12. 



58 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

commanded him to unite with some woman of the tribe, it is 
her duty to obey, no matter what her position or relation- 
ship." 1 Some years ago a Hindu prophetess was impris- 
oned by the English civic judge for violation of the local 
laws and for disturbing the peace. Her only statement in 
defense was: "Years ago when a girl, I met in the jungle 
face to face the God Siva. He entered into my bosom. He 
abides with me now. My blessing is his blessing ; my curse, 
his curse." 2 The worshipper could sometimes break cus- 
toms and defy established usage, because there existed be- 
tween him and his god certain sacred relations, singularly 
his own and not to be infringed by the social body. Ob- 
viously, beliefs of the kind could be neither usual nor wide- 
spread ; but that they existed at all and, stranger still, that 
they could be acknowledged, is very significant. As Pro- 
fessor 1 Brinton concludes: "This freedom was doubtless 
abused, but it secured for the individual a degree of per- 
sonal liberty that could be attained in no other way." 3 It 
was a very crude, though an apparently real, striving after 
the great religious principle — a free conscience. 

As religious philosophy became more developed and re- 
fined, the emphasis on liberty also became more pronounced. 
The Stoics vaunted with considerable fervor the freedom of 
the unit, the right to think and act only with the sanction of 
a convinced, inward approval. Through their doctrines of 
universal brotherhood and free-will the Stoics rose to an im- 
posing consciousness of the single life. Stoicism was not 
without its reward. It had a decided influence on the ration- 
alizing and liberalizing tendency in later Roman Law. 4 
The lover of what is best in human thought will never de- 
preciate Stoicism, but at the same time he will miss in the 
careful perusal of its history that detailed application 
where theory gives evidence of becoming a practical possi- 
bility. 

The other ideas in which the belief in personal worth 

1 D. G. Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, New York, 1905, p. 244. 

* Walthouse. Jour, of the Anfhrov. Soc, XIV. r>. 189. 

*IMd., p. 245. 

4 Arnold in his work on Roman Stoicism (Cambridge, 1911, c. 16) says that 
Stoic principles influenced the common people and that a number of re- 
forms, like those of the Gracchi, are to be attributed to Stoic teaching. 



RELIGIOUS PERSONALITY. 59 



expressed itself in pre-Christian speculation were not so sat- 
isfactorily evolved. Chief of these was the notion of sur- 
vival. Survival, in primitive religions, and even in the pop- 
ular fancy of the classical period, meant the continued ex- 
istence of both body and soul. Here, the concept of sur- 
vival, with its necessary postulate of responsibilty, lacked 
much of its efficiency, because it was connected to a great 
extent with a state of material happiness. Later, the upper 
and literary classes did not conceive the fate of the soul as 
connected with the fate of the body. Survival was then 
transformed into the meaning of "divinization" and, be- 
cause it was associated with the cold, conventional formal- 
ism of the classical creeds, it received a final impetus in the 
direction of useless. 1 In the mystery-religions, however, 
the conviction of immortality whether thought of as per- 
sonal survival or as an absorption by a gradual purifying 
process into the divine life, did inspire, especially among 
slaves and soldiers, much individual initiative. Unfor- 
tunately for itself, the immortality of the cults could not 
stand the test of advancing enlightenment. Just as no 
theory of life can afford to ignore the imperishable value 
of the human soul, so a conception of immortality is value- 
less unless it gives an explanation of the present that is 
more intelligible than mere emotional antagonism. The 
mystery-religions, at the very climax of their appeal in 
the Eoman world, viewed corporeal existence as an evil 
and expected no good from a life in society. 2 

It would be idle to deny that the Christians also felt 
a certain contempt for the actual. But this feeling was 
not aroused by the actual as such, but only because of 
the reasonable reference of all things to eternity. They 
did not sacrifice the present to the eternal. They simply 



1 The divinity acquired by all, irrespective of class or condition, depended 
on the precarious fidelity in worship on the part of the living. Cicero, 
De Leg., II, 9 : III, 2 ; Plato, Laws, IX, 926-7 ; Horace, Odes, II, 23. 

' Cumont, Oriental Religions, pp. 39, 43. No doubt, the Cults provided "so- 
cial helps and mutual encouragements, the stimulus or the consolation 
of common interests and enthusiasms" (Dill, Roman Society, p. 76) 
within the corporation which might be expected to equal the social ef- 
fectiveness of "fraternity" in our modern secret societies, and no more. 



60 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

explained the present by the eternal. 3 They thought to 
live. It could not be otherwise, for they regarded the 
present as the stuff out of which to fashion a concrete and 
attainable future. They sought to inject harmony, justice 
and charity into social activities, and they urged the reali- 
zation, as far as possible, in time and in societies, of those 
principles upon which it was believed eternal justice and 
happiness rested. The foundations of the "City of God" 
were placed on the common ground of our world. It was 
not, and is not today, an ideal to tempt men who identify 
the practical with the expedient. But the whole plan was 
an outpouring of the awakened Christian conscience, de- 
manding that its sanctions be recognized for every effective 
decision in the entire sphere of secular concerns. 

The Christians did not constitute a revolutionary party. 
They did not try to attract to their standards, by a dash 
of daring, the restless masses hoping for a means of egress 
from the grinding conditions of the existing regime. Still, 
it is not true to say that ' ' Christianity did not bring a new 
philosophy of life nor furnish the starting point for a 
revolt against oppression." This is the prevalent indict- 
ment against the Christian Eeligion, and the reason urged 
for the necessity of a new social religion. 1 Christianity 
was theoretically out of joint with the old social order from 
the very beginning; but it realized that a reform would 
have to come then, as always, slowly, and only when indi- 
viduals had been elevated to a state where they could ap- 
preciate the principles of reform. The Christians were 
convinced that man progresses, whether in the affairs of 
this life or in the acquisition of another life, only by the 
exercise of his inherent freedom; and that freedom is 
fostered and pre/served only by religion, the, "freedom 
with which Christ has made us free." Accordingly, they 
strove, first, to emancipate man from slavery to his en- 
vironment; and, secondly, to, establish firmly this new- 
found liberty in the universal respect for conscience. Here 
is the meaning of the seemingly reckless abandon implied in 
the question: "What doth it profit a man, if he gain the 

1 For example, Simon Patten's The Social Basis of Religion, N. Y., 1911. 



RELIGIOUS PERSONALITY. 61 

whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?" 

From the very start, the Christians had a very pro- 
nounced consciousness of the significance and worth of 
personality. The doctrine of universal salvation swept 
away a vast amount of collective and conventional accretion 
which had obscured the true meaning of man. Men could no 
longer be regarded in the mass or type. If all men had 
been purchased by the Blood of Christ; if masters were 
commanded to respect a spiritual value in slaves ; if women 
and children were raised to a condition where they could 
justly expect fair treatment, it was evident that there must 
be some reason for this, apart from the contingencies of 
birth, sex, station, or culture. What precisely helped the 
first Christians to find themselves was the conception of 
the intimate union existing between Christ and the soul 
of the believer. 1 The new ideas, originating in this view of 
life, stirred men to their very depths, opened up vast and 
hitherto unsuspected stretches of! the; interior life, and 
disclosed men to themselves. They forced a claim for the 
individual, since they carried with them the recognition of 
a correlative reality in man that was more than plain self - 
consciousness ; that meant far more than a new ethical rela- 
tion, which is unfortunately all that most modern critics 
see in it ; that was rather the indwelling of something new 
and special in the whole man, through a unique principle 
not formerly present and operating. How else can we 
understand the very ground-idea that the Gospel is con- 
ditioned by the structure of the recipient and capable of 
adaptation to the needs of every man? 

Was this personalism sufficiently virile? Most modern 
sociologists say, no. The principle of union with Christ, 
at the base of the entire Christian theory of individual 
dignity, would be the victim of much rough treatment when 
Christians went out into the forum. It was like a hothouse 
plant that might thrive in the soft, kindly atmosphere of 
religious meetings, but that was doomed to droop and die 



1 Roms. VIII, 11: Gals. II, 20; Philip. I, 21. Letter of S. Ignatius to the 
Ephesians; Irenaeus, Adv. Haer., Bk. IV, c. 37. Cfr. Lebreton, Les 
origines du doffme de la Trinite", Paris. 1910, p. 292 fol. 



62 THE IDEA OF PEBSONALITY. 

under the withering heat and harshness and vigor of 
commonplace life. As a matter of fact, Christians nocked 
in great numbers to the deserts of Egypt, and later on to 
the monasteries of the West, as if salvation could only be 
worked out in solitude. Apparently, the highest expres- 
sion of Christian life had; no real advantages over the 
theatrical withdrawal of Plato and the Stoics to a fanciful 
isolation, where men stood aloof in make-believe detachment 
from all earthly interests ; and, convinced that the rest of 
mankind was full of wickedness, sought solace in a ghastly 
emotionalism, a weak, semi-devotional, colorless self-loss. 
It is inevitable that religion, when it attains the heights of 
mysticism, should be distorted by individuals. Obviously, 
this is no fault of mysticism. The monks were afterwards 
to give very solid evidences of their worth to society and 
to bear witness to the fact that, while not of the world, they 
were to a considerable and substantial extent in it. 1 

The normal notion of Christian personal worth pre- 
served its working power by the recognition of a comple- 
ment in man, more radical even than the reciprocal, inher- 
ent value that followed from being Christ's brother, a sou 
of God, or a temple of the Holy Ghost. In other words, 
the Christian idea of the single life was not founded on the 
passive principle of receptivity, but on the active principle 
that human life is to be assimilated through the aid of 
grace to the life of God Himself. The full comprehension 
of this truth is revealed in the Christian concept of respon- 
sibility. Here we behold the believer not simply in his 
moments of spiritual exaltation, but as he lived and acted 
in the contingencies of his every-day existence, even down 
to the buying of meats in the market-place., 2 

It is too late in the history of Christian civilization to 
begin a defense of mental and moral freedom. Our late 
uneasiness in the presence of "conscientious objectors" 
shows how deeply rooted in our common life is the prin- 



1 For what constitutes in our time a novel view of the spiritual value of 

monasticism to society see Ralph Adams Cram, The Great Thousand 
Years, Boston, 1918. 56-63. 

2 Cor. VIII. 



EELIGIOUS PEESOETALITY. 63 

ciple of a free conscience. The central problem of religious 
personality today arises from a condition of life and society 
where many types of consciences are expressing themselves. 
Conscience is not standardized. There are times when we 
are inclined to think that Mohammedans vary from Chris- 
tians hardly more than the Christians differ among them- 
selves. The strict Calvinist has very few points of contact 
with those other Christians who do not consider their re- 
ligion as an instrument of self-torture. There are men who 
maintain that war is unqualifiedly necessary. There are 
men, on the other hand, who regard war as evil on any 
ground. There are men, finally, who distinguish between 
wars of offense and wars of defense. And millionaires 
have been [known to have conscientious scruples about 
paying taxes. Even here, so long as we remain absolutely 
within the area of individual thought and volition, the mat- 
ter is speculatively not difficult. With, a clear idea of 
conscience and a fairly accurate conception of the objects 
about which it may legitimately judge, we can say a priori 
that every position assumed on sincere conscientious mo- 
tives may reasonably expect recognition. 

At the same lime, when we remember that man is 
social as well as solitary, we cannot fail to be in periodic 
situations that suggest the query as to where respect of 
conscience will stop. Shall we suffer an unrestrained con- 
science up to the point of serious public inconvenience? 
For most men, of course, this is no real problem. Realiz- 
ing that society must have ends and purposes above the 
ends and purposes of individuals, only because they are 
indentical with the greatest good of the majority, men come 
by an easy and rational process to the conclusion that if 
an individual is opposed to the community, the presump- 
tion is that the individual is wrong. As a matter of fact, 
a State will never lack defenders nor the means of obtain- 
ing and increasing its resources through the conscientious 
objections of its members. But the minority must still be 
reckoned with, and here one thing seems certain: force, 
ridicule and punishment will be of no avail. A long line 
of martyrdoms, persecutions, rebellions, and reformations 
should teach us this piece of common sense. All that can 



64 THE IDEA OF PEKSONALITY. 

be advised is that a corporate body adjust its treatment of 
its recalcitrant consciences according to the need. As for 
the rest, there can only be inducement after full and free 
discussion of the beliefs, nd^rms, and sentiments which 
constitute the definite historical content of religious per- 
sonality, and from which conscientious assertion draws 
its motives. Henceforth no theory of the State and no 
definition of authority can be looked upon as complete, 
unless they include provisions for the workings of con- 
science. 

We can understand from what has been said that 
it is no unimportant function of conscience to keep the idea 
of liberty alive among men. The liberty that secures to 
every man protection "in what he believes to be his duty 
against the influence of authority and majorities, custom 
and opinion" 1 can be guaranteed only by the forces that 
develop from within — religion, morals, and to an extent, 
aesthetics. Political, economic and general social forces, 
the forces that develop from without tend to crystallize in 
a scheme of objective conditions that are at once static 
and sacrosanct. Thus, men are afraid to change the sacred 
law of supply and demand, or any other of the "natural" 
laws of trade. They are timid about changing political 
constitutions, of which the world might well be rid. They 
adhere persistently to legal forms long after these have 
been found to be evidently unjust. The attained becomes 
the norm, and even the limit, of the attainable. And yet 
the vitality of a society is precisely in proportion to its 
ability to react against apparently established physical 
and external conditions. This dynamic element comes 
from the inspiration, initiative, and ideals that are supplied 
by individuals, who have outgrown their awe of institutions, 
who rise upward by some stupendous energy that men 
admire but do not understand, and who draw a race after 
them. 

When Mill wrote the essay on Liberty he merely re- 
vived, in part, the Christian interpretation of liberty as 
spiritual. He was keen enough to see that such a liberty 

1 Lord Acton, History of Freedom and Other Essa/ys, London, 1909, p. 3. 



KELIGIOUS PEBSONALITY. 65 



as that proposed by the Chartists, a liberty that meant 
chiefly the external freedom of action required by the indi- 
vidual for the pursuit of his material happiness, was a 
barren affair. What we must have first of all is a power 
that releases individual capacities in the truest and most 
permanent manner, and that makes them available for the 
general happiness ; a power that is not solely the reflection 
of environment, but that reaches down to the very depths 
of our being. This is becoming more apparent, the more 
political and economic theories try to satisfy basic human 
intuitions. If such is the case, religion is still a vital force 
with a very profitable and concrete relation to the rest of 
life. Those who insist that the highest type of religious 
person is marked by a blithesome, if sublime, indifference 
to the concerns of the secular world will, naturally, smile. 
They will ask for a policy of statecraft, for a theory of 
production, short of which they deny any practical value to 
the religious influence. But the new economic liberty, the 
new political liberty will be evolved, not so much through 
forms, codes, policies, and plans as through the proper 
recognition, the free expression, and the harmonious ad- 
justment of the human nature that each man is. It was 
more than mere smartness when a former lecturer of 
Columbia University began his book with the remark that 
"in order to decide whether a city should own its own 
gas-plant, it is necessary to have clear ideas as to what 
nature is". 1 In other words, the spiritual and moral side 
of life will most likely be given greater prominence in our 
thinking. And the Christian religion, with its tangible 
sanctions and spontaneous motives, appealing to the in- 
dividual as an individual, is a force to be reckoned with in 
the world's remaking after the war. Whether it shall rise 
to the full stature of its possibilities depends on its guides 
and teachers. At least, we can no longer minimize its 
power and usefulness. 

1 Edmond Kelly, Government or Human Evolution, New York, 1900. 



CHAPTER SIX. 

ETHICAL PERSONALITY. 

Those who minimize the influence of religion in men's 
lives substitute ' ' ethical ' ' where formerly we used to write 
" religious ". "Ethical" has become synonymous in this 
transfer with the vague, the shadowy, the aspirational, the 
ideal in a loose sense, or, where some attempt is made to 
be more definite, with the "social". 1 

The notion that religion and morality covered differ- 
ent spheres of human activity was really due to Hobbes. 
Eecent speculation has tended to emphasize the separation 
under the strong conviction that the older morality is no 
longer available for modern needs, because it was inter- 
preted too much in terms of individual selfishness and too 
little in terms of social altruism. Of course, no one must 
be told that it is not in reality possible to cut off religion 
from morality. What we do is to give a new content to 
religion. If we will not have a God in the heavens, we 
fashion gods from our human and social institutions. But 
this will be matter for later reference. 2 

So far as we wish to give ethical personality a struc- 
ture and functioning of its own, we may describe it, 
psychologically, as a consciousness of our relations to other 
persons, to the world, and to God, whence emerges a sys- 
tem of values for the regulation of conduct. These values 
form the material of moral judgments. The latter are 
always accompanied by the psychological necessity of as- 
suming an attitude. This is responsibility. As a still fur- 
ther consequence, the ethical person becomes a subject of 
rights and duties. Before detailing the characteristics of 
ethical personality, we must be clear about some intro- 

1 The latter meaning is now accepted as the "scientific" one. For an illus- 

tration of its application see J. K. Folsom, The Social Psychology of 
Morality, in the Am. Jour, of Soc, Jan., 1918. 

2 The latest novelties are put in a popular and entertaining way by Walter 

Rauschenbusch in his book A Theology for the Social Gospel, New 
York, 1918. 



68 THE IDEA OF PEKSONALITY. 



ductory matter. 

In the first place, it is tritely obvious that conduct, to 
be ethically intelligible, must be conduct directed to some 
end. The immediate ends of action we cannot ignore, 
without doing violence to common sense. The prevalent 
custom of viewing ends as ''survivals" is distinctly mis- 
leading. Of what conceivable educative use is a beneficial 
survival unless it is perceived to be the term of new activ- 
ity on the part of some consciousness? And we cannot 
say that ethical progress goes on without consciousness. 
Selection is no abstract process; and unless we allow for 
some sort of conscious selection we might as well give up 
all hope of moral education. In other words, full recog- 
nition must be accorded the fact that the individual himself 
is a determinant of variations, the results of his own pecu- 
liar interest in activity. 1 Now, if instead of considering 
isolated acts, motives, and judgments, we make the process 
extend over a whole life-time, the same conclusion holds. 
Only, we must then avoid supposing that the teleological 
aspect of conduct implies completed development. "Prog- 
ress is so manifestly an act, habit or condition of the 
evolving subject itself that it would be absurd to think 
that the Scholastics made no provision for a subjective 
final end; they expressly describe the attainment of the 
final end as a soul act, as 'aliquid animae.' But that thing 
which we finally tend to attain, and which serves as the 
first principle of all human action, is, in Scholastic philos- 
ophy, external. Again, Aquinas even qualifies his asser- 
tion of an objective end, when he writes that the objective 
end is not wholly extrinsic to, or divided from the human 
act. 'The end,' he says, 'is not altogether extrinsic to the 
act because it is related to the act as principle or as term'. 
Thus, the objective final end, though external, is still to be 
regarded as standing in intimate relation to the agent, and 
even as completing his act, since a cognitive and appeti- 
tive act can only be completed by the object known and 



1 Cfr. St. Thomas' description of the ends of actions on the basis of actions 
"proper to man as man." Summa, Q. I., art. I, in corp. 



ETHICAL PEESONALITY. 69 



desired". 1 For the present it does not matter whether the 
scheme of ends lies wholly within, or partly without, the 
universe. 

Granting that experience constantly reveals purposes 
which exercise a controlling influence over particular forms 
of ethical expression, the question still remains as to how 
the connection between ends and conduct comes to be re- 
garded as necessary. Involved in this problem is not only 
the fact that some acts are good and some bad, according as 
they realize the end or not ; but also the further fact that we 
are bound to perform the good acts. Naturally, "if life is 
an object of desire for men, all that tends to maintain and 

promote life becomes hypothetically necessary These 

hypothetical imperatives become assertory the moment one 
adds : de facto man wishes to live and be happy. ' n But since 
this hypothetical series of things that tend to promote and 
maintain life is not closed by the individual, but by the 
nature of things, we must still explain the relation of the 
former to the latter and the source of necessity between 
ends and personal conduct. A few illustrative solutions 
will help to clarify the situation. 

Every one will remember the view, formerly very pop- 
ular, that because the cosmic order is self-sufficient, man's 
conduct is to be judged and governed by precisely the same 
principles that rule all other manifestations of natural 
energy. This led to the adoption of physical energy as the 
ideal type of natural manifestation. Conduct works on the 
same principles as machinery. The best way to describe it 
is simply to say that it happens. In the physical sciences 
it is sufficient, if events are interpreted according to their 
serial conjunctions; but, on this level alone, they are no 
more ethically intelligible than the interminable wheel of 
Buddha. It is only as facts are related to some conscious- 
ness with a norm of valuation that they reveal those fit- 
nesses from which are deduced the comparative excellences 
of ethics. "We can understand why Herbert Spencer's brave 
program about determining "from the laws of life and the 

1 M. Cronin, The Science of Ethics, New York, 1909, Vol. I, p. 64. 
1 A Fouillee, Les Elements Sociologiques De la Morale, Paris, 1905, 2nd ed., 
pp. 21-22. 



70 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

conditions of existence what kinds of action necessarily tend 
to produce happiness " is so disappointing. Where are we 
to start? What is existence for? What is happiness? Are 
all types of fact of equal importance in determining the laws 
of life and the conditions of existence ? Shall we regard the 
happiness of the millionaire in the pleasures of consump- 
tion, or of the artist in the enjoyment of production, or of 
the philosopher in the satisfaction of contemplation as the 
ideal type? And if all types are valuable, what norms shall 
guide accurate generalizations and secure stability? Are 
moral laws simply compromise conclusions from the ups and 
downs of history? These are questions which must ob- 
viously be decided in advance. 

Experience is, indeed, a stern teacher. Moreover, any 
moral code is effective, only in proportion as it reflects the 
needs and thef constitution of actual human nature. A 
moral law conceived from above or from the outside, if such 
were possible, without any relation to the problems and con- 
ditions of our life here in the world, could in no sense be a 
source of obligation to anybody. But how we can inhale or 
absorb morality from the facts, and assimilate responsi- 
bility from the connections of facts, without any previous 
principles of course and direction, is a difficulty which not 
even E. B. Holt's dramatic vindication of the ethics of the 
dust can remove. 1 There is a great deal of attractive talk 
about dirt and sweat, but one cannot escape the conviction 
that the perspiration is athletic. Everyone who has really 
struggled for character, fought to make his conduct realize 
even proximate and worldly aims, knows that his ideals as 
frequently as not fly in the teeth of what is concretely use- 
ful. For the moment the man seems isolated, out of joint 

with the whole system. 

A similar explanation of the relation of "oughtness" 
between end and act is that which reduces moral obligation 
to the category of biological needs. It is open to the same 
objections. Mr. Folsom concludes a. little too hastily that 
the urging of the moral obligation is no more than the im- 

1 The Freudian Wish and its Relation to Ethics, New York, 1915, p. 128. 



ETHICAL PEKSONALITY. 71 



pulse to eat. 1 This has meaning if duty is a physical, in- 
stead of a moral, necessity. It is impossible, with our 
mental equipment such as it is, to conceive the physical 
necessity of doing good, since men, as a matter of fact, fre- 
quently do evil. 2 Even in cases where we do avoid wrong, 
and do it rather habitually, there is more to the process than 
simply shunning poisonous edibles. Of course, it is sup- 
posed that if man had perfect knowledge, he would be in the 
same condition psychically as an organism fully equipped 
physicalljy. So, Mr. Folsom says, man "must learn to 
worry more about his ignorance than about his badness of 
motives. ' ' 3 This is a variation of the knowledge theory of 
ethics, proposed every now and again in the history of 
morals. Knowledge becomes a substitute for responsibil- 
ity. Thus, Lord Brougham and Sir Eobert Peel, in the 
middle of the last century, would have made men think and 
act God through a knowledge of physics, astronomy, and 
natural history. We have more refined forms of the theory 
at present. We use now the concepts of ideo-motor action, 
imitation and suggestion. 4 There is a certain confidence 
that an idea will be realized in behaviour, if only we can get 
it into the mind and keep antithetical ideas out. There is a 
measure of speculative worth in all this, but we are equally 
aware from experience, actual and historical, that ideas of 
good acts do not always create good acts. To think that a 
knowledge of the universe will inevitably engender a desire 
to live the purposes of the universe has always been the 
dream of poets. The men who deal with life as it is, the 
statesmen, jurists, physicians and priests, have too often 
been painfully aware of a tendency to the very opposite. 

The gist of all such attitudes is that moral propositions 
simply repeat experience, and that their urgency arises 
from our being parts of a universe, or a humanity, that is 
moving to some ideal end. We doubt the power of this 



1 The Am. Jour, of Soc, Jan.. 1918, 76., p. 436. 

s For the Scholastic distinction as to the kinds of necessity, see St. Thomas, 

Summa, Q. 82, art. I. 
8 Am. Jour, of Soc, lb., p. 490. 
* For a terse application of these ideas see M. W. Keatinge, Suggestion in 

Education New York, 1907, p. 30. 



72 THE IDEA OF PEKSONALITY. 

philosophy as a practical rule of life for the individual. It 
is too vague. It does not satisfy certain ethical situations 
that any man knows to be essentially internal. It does not 
give definite shape to the real circumstances of any indi- 
vidual life ; for it denies to the individual an end of his own, 
and establishes the moral law as a contrivance for the bene- 
fit of the species. A morality that deals in the worlds, the 
laws of which are intended for the movements of masses, 
cannot conveniently be made the basis of obligatory ideals, 
the practical application of which is binding on us through 
all the minute circumstances that urge to action. 

The Scholastics endeavored to avoid such neglect of the 
individual. They asserted that the ultimate end of all 
human action is external, but they did not identify this end 
with the triumph of the species. The end is related to every 
agent. To put the matter in the metaphysical language of 
the Schoolmen : "In order to form the judgment — the good 
ought to be done — we require to realize mentally a final 
necessity — i. e., a necessary connection of means with end, 
such that, without the means, the end cannot be obtained. 
But is this connection enough? What if the end be not 
itself necessary? Shall we then be compelled to admit an 
' ought ' ? Study is necessary to science, but is science neces- 
sary? If it is not, in what sense can you say that study is 
necessary? Its necessity is merely hypothetical. But 
moral necessity is an absolute necessity; a thesis not a 
hypothesis (that is, a categorical, not a hypothetical neces- 
sity). It arises from an end to which every will tends with 
real necessity Moral obligation may therefore be de- 
fined as an 'ought' resulting from the necessary connection 
of means with a necessary end. ' n Later on, we may be forced 
to admit a personal element into the source of responsibility 
and obligation. For the present, it is sufficient if we remem- 
ber that no necessity is valuable from our human standpoint 
unless it involves the individual in the scheme. We must 
adjust the moral order to single minds and wills. "For 
this beginning we can allow no other: no pretended inter- 
haviour might be deduced; still less that silly and offensive 

^aparelli, quoted in M. Cronin, o». eft.,' Vol. I, D. 212. 



ETHICAL PERSONALITY. 73 



pretation of the plan of the world, from which, as if it were 
possible for us, the obligatory commandments of our be- 
custom which at present plumes itself with so great aplomb 
on descending into the entertaining incidents of natural his- 
tory, and — out of a tendency to ascending development 
which is imagined to have been discovered in the animal 
world — construing the summit, which logically ought to form 
the behaviour of humanity. If we could not find in our 
own conscience the irrevocable criterion of our moral judg- 
ment, we should certainly not get it from the beasts; for 
what observation of them might teach us that the series of 
development we suppose we find in them goes upward to the 
perfect, and not downwards to the bad, we could know, only 
if it were beforehand completely clear to us, which we 
should regard as the better and the worse end of this 
scale. ' n 

We should be now in a fairer position for constructing 
a positive concept of the ethical person. The latter is, first 
of all, one who possesses within himself rational intuitions 
and ideals that are surely the results of purely internal 
forces, that "need no proof but their own evidence." 2 The 
Intuitionist is undoubtedly psychologically correct on this 
point. The stock of such intuitions is necessarily small, 
and consists only of those truths of the moral order known 
as fundamental and primary. But that they are rational in 
origin, or " inner relations," as some prefer to call them, is 
as true as the fact that there are no other pathways along 
which they could have come, or at least could have come in 
the final and apodictical form in which they appear in con- 
sciousness. These intellectual certitudes persuade as prin- 
ciples known to be true ; and it was a crime to carry them 

1 Hermann Lotze, quoted in W. Wallace, Lectures and Essays on Natural 
Theology and Ethics. Oxford ed.. 1898. p. 508. 

* "Moral intuition is the percipient act by which the truth of a self-evident 
moral principle is immediately cognized — The term moral instinct is em- 
ployed to denote a native disposition towards some class of socially 
useful acts." M. Maher. Psychology, p. 323, n. 10. Trotter urges that 
the strong internal appeal of moral propositions is proof of their in- 
stinctive origin ; but he does not offer convincing proof that the higher 
ideals can be reduced to this level. (Instincts of the Herd in Peltce 
and War, New York, 1916). Professor James has remarked the ob- 
vious truth, that the nobler the ideal, the more revolutionary it is 
likely to be. 



74 THE IDEA OP PERSONALITY. 



over from the domain of intuitive rational knowledge to 
that of blind belief or mere instinctive feeling. 

All else is growth. The individual, like the race, rises 
step by step. Each conquest has brought into clearer view 
still other heights of moral achievement, and motives for 
further triumphs are found in past victories. But, while 
the advocates of real personality attribute the principle of 
growth to the constructive power of human reason, working 
on its native intuitions, those who reduce personality to con- 
sciousness would conceive the gradual perfecting of conduct- 
control as due to environmental influence. A favorite 
method is to build up a scheme of behaviour that embraces 
simply a system of instinctive reactions, unattended by any 
concept, however obscure. No one today finds great diffi- 
culty in admitting that the instinctive processes are useful 
for explaining many forms of conduct. Formerly it was 
considered a fatal defect that instincts could give rise only 
to isolated acts, each one blind and fortuitous. 1 Keener 
study has revealed the fact that, even though funda- 
mentally an instinctive tendency may be unaccompanied 
by any clear conception of the purpose served, instincts 
are always forming themselves into a network, which 
shows that the apprehending power of reason is not absent 
wholly from the process. Instincts, modified by experience, 
are no longer blind; and, where there is memory, there 
should also be some expectation of consequences. This would 
apparently save the process from being merely mechanical 
and would ultimately permit of conscious development. But 
it falls far short of being an adequate theory of the origin 
or nature of morality. 

It is not possible here to treat instincts exhaustively. 
One who believes in the Scholastic doctrine of personality 
will instantly object to the hasty manner in which rational 
processes are reduced to instinctive categories by the think- 
ers of our time. We may, of course, so broaden the logical 
content of instinct as to include all the actions which a man 

1 For a discussion of instincts from the side of modern science, see William 
James, Psychology, N. Y., 1890, Vol. II, p. 383. For the relation of in- 
stincts to reflexes and what are termed "inborn capacities" see E. L. 
Thorndike, The Original Nature of Man, N. Y., 1913, p. 24. 



ETHICAL PERSONALITY. 75 



performs, even those carried out in response to an idea; but 
this is evidently an arbitrary extension of the instinctive 
operation. When we are told that the elementary consti- 
tution of instinctive conduct does not permit of the intrusion 
of idea forces, 1 and when we remember that the conscious 
accommodations in instinctive tendencies constitute a region 
about which we are as yet poorly informed, we may be par- 
doned for refusing to surrender without a priori justifica- 
tion or conclusive experimental evidence a situation where 
the facts cohere with tolerable clearness for one in which 
the only excuse for obscurity is the dim hope that reason 
may finally be revealed as of the same flesh and blood as 
instincts. The intuitive reason is practically coextensive 
with all the workings of sense : an obscure concept is prac- 
tically simultaneous with our first feelings and sensations. 
Intuitive reason acts in, through, and with sense, in the ac- 
quisition of knowledge, even though the discursive reason 
acts after sense, in the elaboration of the data acquired by 
reason and sense together. Here we have the fallacy of 
purpose and procedure characteristic of this whole reduc- 
tionist movement: the fallacy of separating the work of 
reason and the work of sense. It is sufficient condemnation 
to po,int it out. Furthermore, if, as James says, instincts 
seem to be implanted for the sake of forming habits, the 
need for an accompanying authority over the result, more 
definite than what is provided by the workings of the in- 
stincts themselves, becomes all the more imperative, 2 It is 
very well to assert that all will come out right in the end, 
because instincts represent racial habits. But aside from 
the fact that some reactions are preserved which are useless 
or positively disadvantageous, "instincts are often carried 
out in a bungling fashion and in the face of circumstances 
clearly fatal to the successful issue." 3 Where are we to 
find the inhibitory power so essential to moral growth? 4 

1 E. L. Thorndike, op. cit., p. 24. 

2 William James, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 402. 

3 J. R. Angell, Psychology, p. 342. 

4 Scholastic psychology is not particularly rich in experimental studies of 

instinct (the vis aestimativa of the older Schoolmen). There are, how- 
ever, some works of real merit among Catholic scholars, such, for ex- 
ample, as St. George Mivart's The Origin of Human Reason, London, 
1889, and Lessons from Nature, London, 1876. The general principles 
on which the problems of instinct are usually solved from the Scholastic 
side may be had in the Supplementary Chapter to M. Maher's Psy- 
chology . 



76 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

Ethically, then, instinctive action does not contain suf- 
ficient directive power, or rather clearly presupposes such 
power, to respond to right as against wrong. Bullying and 
cruelty issue just as easily and naturally from the same 
source that impels the justifiable acquisition of food. Col- 
lecting and hoarding, also developed in connection with 
food-getting tendencies, lead just as readily to miserliness. 
The kind of moral ideals we want demands more than the 
* 'indefinite and unpredictable susceptibility to modification 
from environing conditions, with an equally uncertain sub- 
mission to conscious guidance." 1 Certainly, those intuitive 
ideals in our moral consciousness that fly in the face of ex- 
perience, that are not so much summaries from the past as 
incentives for the future, could never have risen in that 
way. Progressive human behaviour requires more than the 
mere conscious adaptation of means to ends. It demands 
also the capacity to abstract and generalize over a large 
number of situations. If self-control is to mean anything, 
it must imply, besides the activity of memory, reflection and 
inference, the directive work of intelligence, intervening to 
transform native reactions in accordance with the thought 
and volition of the individual. Popular evolution used to 
picture ethical progress as a passage from almost absolute 
moral anarchy. That such a chaotic state of affairs ever 
existed is now denied by most competent students, 2 J. M. 
Baldwin's theory of organic selection as opposed to natural 
selection, whether accepted or not, expresses clearly the 
necessity for some sort of intelligent action during the time 
when instinctive habits are in the process of formation. Men 
could never have been entirely without the help of rational 
interpretation, combining, in no matter how small a degree, 
deduction with induction, passing from causes to effects, 
from principles to consequences. Temperament, impulse, 

*J. R. Angell, op. tit., p. 342. W. McDougall, (Social Psychology, New 
York, 1908, p. 217), and C. H. Cooley, (Human Nature and the Social 
Order, New York, 1902, p. 64), hold that there are no specific original 
roots for supporting approval and disapproval responses. E. L. Thorn- 
dike (op. tit., p. 89) maintains that in the natural man approval and 
disapproval appear as satisfiers and annoyers, wholly different, of 
course, from cultivated moral approbation and disapprobation. 

4 For example, P. A. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid : A Factor in Evolution, New 
York, 1902. 



ETHICAL PERSONALITY. 77 

training, climate, all need to be brought down, directly or in- 
directly, to reason, with its evidence and intellectual justi- 
fications. 

Great caution is needed to keep us from excesses. All 
valuable coordinations, even some commonly regarded as 
moral, do not have to be intellectual in origin. Parental 
behaviour, for instance, would appear to be easily explicable 
on instinctive grounds. However, where we put a value on 
conduct, the latter should then be considered moral. Pro- 
fessor Sorley's distinction between the facts of human con- 
duct and the worth of conduct is exceedingly helpful. 1 The 
ethical question regards what conduct should be. This may 
come, of course, after our experience of certain actions, but 
experience itself cannot originate the moral value. It does 
no more than present us with the facts in the case. Our 
moral judgments may be efficient even when opposed to ex- 
perience. Probably most men will continue to view sitting 
by the sick bedside as an utterly worthy act, despite the edict 
of modern psychologists that so to sit is an irrational relic 
from an original impulse, once justified as a form of 
mutual aid advantageous to the group's survival. The big 
thing about conduct is not what happens, but why it happens. 
To get at the answer to this query, it is necessary to turn 
up and down, round and about, the elements of experience. 
In this sense, surely, reason, and not unthinking habits, is 
the ground of our inner moral existence. 

The reason that thus functions intuitively, constructive- 
ly, and purposively in moral consciousness does not rely for 
its superiority on any such artificial distinction as Butler 
would have made between the lower and higher parts of our 
nature. Nor is it the far-off recluse of ultra-intellectualists 
of the type of Cudworth, Wollaston and Clarke. It works 
side by side with every other manifestation of the self. It 
is the ever-present accompaniment of all the other faculties. 
The Scholastic does not conceive reason as occupied with a 
few shadowy, cognitive wants, or he would not have defined 
morality as acting up to one's rational nature.? He con- 



1 Ethics of Naturalism, p. 310. 

2 J. Rickaby, Ethics, 2nd ed., p. 245. 



78 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

cedes the interrelation, to some extent, of reason with all 
human activity. He admits, like everybody else, that ' ' there 
is normally attached to the ethical intuition an emotional 
state which may be styled the moral sentiment, provided this 
term be properly understood. Eeverence or awe in the 
presence of a ruling authority, admiration for the good, 
natural love of right and dislike of wrong, with a consequent 
feeling of approval or disapproval of the agent, all blend 
together in the constitution of the moral emotion. Instinc- 
tive impulses of benevolence and sympathy reinforce this 
feeling in certain directions ; and judicious education, asso- 
ciation, and the practice of virtue may, when they cooper- 
ate, give immense force to the moral sentiment, just as, when 
unfavorable, they may extinguish moral sensibility even if 
they cannot completely pervert the moral judgment. ' n 

Here, then, is the first meaning attaching to ethical per- 
son. He is a creature of original action, of initiative, of 
movement to an end. He is subject also to laws of solidar- 
ity. He is not the air-tight individual Leibnitz, nor the 
wild, unrestrained satyr of Eousseau. He is one in whom 
all the meaning of selection, environment, and heredity must 
be taken up and carried on anew. Mere association, mere 
instinctive points of contact with the race will not suffice. 
It is the inner cohesions, expressed in our mental processes 
and recognized as moral principles, that save the ethical 
situation from being mere slavish submission to law and 
custom. Moral education might, perhaps, be made easier 
if we could come to believe that conduct is at bottom a sys- 
tem of non-rational impulses; and that even when reason 
does appear, it is not essentially a principle of self-determi- 
nation. But the premises adduced for this belief, namely, 
the essential sameness of human and animal behaviour and 
moral judgment as idealized experience, are too slender to 
make of this hope anything more than crude optimism. 
External pressure, whether conceived as the Fate of the 
Greek dramatists, the Absolute of some years back, or the 
Environment of today, is too remote, too unmeaning, too 
remorseless, too humanly soulless to be the alpha and omega 

1 M. Maher, Psychology, p. 416. 



ETHICAL PERSONALITY. 79 



of that inward thing we call the moral life. 

What has been done so far is only to show that ethical 
personality requires some power of discrimination and orig- 
ination, that is essentially intrinsic. ' There may be a sus- 
picion that the power was imbedded altogether too deeply in 
our nature, ever again to permit of outward expression. 
This is what made Balfour say that rational necessity does 
not carry us beyond a system of mere solipsism. 1 It is what 
makes modern psychologists conceive self-control largely in 
terms of instinct-emotion processes, the formation of neural 
pathways, and the organization of physiological habits. But 
the fact is that the intellect does not perceive moral truths 
as a luxury. It is busy all the while fashioning motives for 
the will. There is in every rational judgment of ethics the 
moral necessity of realizing the terms of the judgment in 
conduct. The volitional process not only supplements the 
rational, but connects our moral life with the outside world. 
Ethical life assumes the further aspect of duty. 

Passing over for the moment the question as to the ulti- 
mate base of obligation, we may pause to point out its in- 
evitable personal character. Without fear of future Mills, 
Bains and Spencers, it may be confidently asserted that ex- 
ternal compulsion is not the original factor in the feeling of 
duty. Sanction is not an ultimate term but is further re- 
stricted "by the conditions in an individual which make it 
right to punish him." 2 Social needs will suppose in every 
case our ability to respond by laying the categorical necesity 
of duty from within ourselves. Even those who believe that 
the self is a social creation concede that we might as well 
have a society of stones or trees as of men, if the latter can- 
not react from the urging of obligation; "for to have a 
stable society the idea of co-operation, of social service, of 
social responsibility, if they have not grown normally into 
the individual's sense of self, must be incorporated into it 
through proper social discipline and treatment." 3 The 



1 Foundations of Belief, London, 1895 ; see chapter on Authority and Reason 

p. 202, fol. 
2 W. Wallace, op. cit., p. 301. 
* A. J. Todd, Theories of Social Progress, New York, 1918, p. 51. 



80 THE IDEA OF PEKSOISTALITY. 

language of Professor Todd is here undoubtedly a reflection 
of the present social theories; but it is clear that he is re- 
verting to a somewhat older doctrine and that fundamental- 
ly he agrees with Lecky that usefulness to society is a cri- 
terion that must rest ultimately on the recognition within 
us of a natural sense of moral obligation. 1 

It ought to be clear, then, that no ethical demand has 
any efficiency unless the self is responsive to that demand. 
A sphere in which right and wrong, obligation and responsi- 
bility have any real meaning cannot be the creation of ex- 
clusively external forces. There must be active coopera- 
tion of an intellect that assents and of a will capable of 
making the assent vital. But that there must be such a 
claim is equally evident, if means are ever to acquire the 
character of oughtness, by which responsibility can be in- 
telligibly interpreted. Metaphysics has already been used 
to show that every individual is connected with an end, but 
it was suggested then that metaphysics may fall short if it 
attempts to probe too deeply into the relation of means to 
end. It does not help to consider man in the abstract and 
to imagine that moral laws are simple deductions from this 
ideal order. Utopias of the sort break down before the ex- 
pediently practical demands of actual life. They break 
down as they did in the case of the ' ' natural law ' ' of later 
Roman Jurisprudence ; as they did afterwards in the eight- 
eenth century schemes of "natural rights." The ethical 
person is no doubt aware of a purposive element in his life ; 
but, as an individual, he could hardly originate this purpose. 
A man may be a fool for not living up to his rational na- 
ture, as he is a fool for not living up to the laws of hygiene 
or for eating poisonous edibles; but he is not a fool, as 
Father Cronin points out, for asking why he may not vio- 
late his nature and be a fool., 2 

In other words, it is senseless to say that a man is re- 
sponsible to himself. In what way could he be? Reason 
only directs the act. It does not create the laws according 
to which the act should be directed. This is all the Scholas- 
tics meant when they said that the moral order of the hu- 

1 W. E. H. Lecky, Hist, of Europ. Morals, N. Y., 1869, Vol. I, p. 4. 
2 Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 213. 



ETHICAL, PEKSONALITY. 81 

man act is set up in the act of human reason. Kant's Cate- 
gorical Imperative is useless. It orders, because some- 
where else there has already been established conviction re- 
garding the things which it orders. The strange inconsist- 
ency of all subjectivism, ancient or modern, is that, while 
professing a profound trust in the separate life of the in- 
dividual, it substitutes belief for rational appraisals of con- 
duct and identifies this belief with the emotional side of life. 
The assertion of self then becomes the glorification of im- 
pulsiveness. Each man adopts a plan of life for which he 
has a temperamental attraction. Few men will die for the 
ideal order which reason sets up. Many will accept greed- 
ily, and live, a system that makes each one's thoughts and 
desires the norm of living. 

The very fact that there are creatures like ourselves, 
capable of making demands on our conduct, forever pre- 
cludes subjectivism. The mere contact of man with man is, 
however, not entirely sufficient. In the adjustment of neigh- 
borly relations, in the clash of right with right, of obliga- 
tion with obligation, there must be some force capable of 
dictatating "all enveloping demands." Men must be in 
certain essential accord regarding the general purpose of 
life, before they can be unanimous on the value of actions 
as means, or reach any definite conception as to the char- 
acter of perfect human happiness. It can be granted that 
Society, or a religion of humanity, insofar as it has pos- 
sibilities of impressing on men a common purpose, may 
provide a basis for ethics. That Society is the only su- 
preme principle of moral obligation is another matter. If 
there is no supra-mundane existence, if there is no God, 
then life in society is the ultimate term of all our cravings 
and activity. The question is one of fact. 

To the extent, however, that the subject lends itself to 
a priori discussion, we may designate as an utter assump- 
tion the assertion that a world in which the highest con- 
sciousness is human offers a more solid foundation for ethics 
and makes conduct more virile than a world where appeal 
to a Divine Person is allowed. This would be true only on 
the supposition that an other-worldly principle so wasted 
all our energy as to leave us unfit for the obvious duties that 



82 THE IDEA OP PEESOJSTAL1TY. 

we are called upon to fulfil in this world. 1 But such a sup- 
position is precisely what every theist denies. The assent, 
for example, which the Christian gives to God is not a mere 
intellectual approval but what the logicians call a "real" 
assent, that is, an assent with all a man's seeing, feeling, 
thinking and acting. Isolation can be regarded as an aim 
only where many departments of life have been ignored; 
but this condition is evidently excluded in a plan which de- 
mands as a consequence of communion with God a better set 
of relations among men themselves. Absorption in God 
means simply, that no complexus of worldly situations can 
ever be judged exclusively on their own merits apart from 
God and his law ; that religion must operate in and through 
all activity. And science or no science, the theist in arriv- 
ing at this conclusion is no worse off and no more violates 
the laws of thought than the naturalist who supposes the 
supreme principle of conduct to reside in an enlarged, ideal- 
ized, and, as far as we can see, mythological humanity. 

The importance of God in an ethical scheme is that we 
have a Person who is capable of making imperative de- 
mands in a direct personal way on every consciousness, who 
introduces harmony and regulation among all the various 
demands which, in a system of finite necessities, have nearly 
all an equal value, and which, consequently, perplex thought 
and render action hesitating. This order has an immeas- 
urable ethical advantage over one dominated entirely by 
ideas of a perfect society, which can hardly appeal to the 
ordinary man as anything better than an abstraction. Why 
must I be altruistic? Because Society has given me all I 
have ? This might b e a popular reason with the upper and 
solid middle classes, but the millions would openly laugh. 
Or because it is our unavoidable duty to assist in the realiza- 
tion of all those superiorities which are attributed to re- 
mote posterity? But how can we love those creatures who 
seem to us so snobbishly good, who triumph on our agonies, 
who would probably care less for us than we do about the 
explorers of America or the Fathers of the Eevolution? If 
we cannot love them, what terrestrial force will ever make 

1 Cfr. Encyclical of Leo XIII, On the Rosary. 



ETHICAL. PEKSONALITY. 83 

us work and sweat for them? It will be said, of course, that 
this is our selfishness which will disappear with the devel- 
opment of the great Eros. But, as James said, "in a mere- 
ly human world without a God, the appeal to our moral 
energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power. Life, 
to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical sym- 
phony; but it is played in a compass of a couple of poor oc- 
taves, and the infinite scale of values fails to open up. ' n 

Radical evolutionists, be it said to the credit of their 
common sense, entertain no such delusions on the matter. 
They are aware that the perfect order of things will not 
come simply because a Socrates or two wish it. They are 
not so comfortably sure, either, that ' ' society will ultimately 
grow into the ethical type, and that the ethical type will de- 
monstrate its superior strength and its fitness to survive. ' ' 2 
There is much reason for their scepticism if we can accept 
such statements as those of F. Boas, minimizing the amount 
of progress that has taken place from the time of our remote 
ancestors. 3 Hence, they put forth such theories as that of 
A. Sutherland, who promises general justice and affection 
through the elimination of the cruel, stupid, and perverse 
individuals of the species. 4 They would breed better men 
by finding out what inheritable variations tend towards 
greater moral capacities. Results have been attained, with 
similar methods, among animals and plants. Why not with 
men 1 ? It is a little crude, perhaps, and not easy of verifi- 
cation; but it is far preferable to hoping that society, 
through the exercise of some magical power over individ- 
uals, will educate men to the level where they simply can- 
not be false to their altruism, where they would no more 
commit themselves to a life of theft, lying, and adultery than 
they would think of voluntarily starving themselves. 

There is one last aspect of ethical personality against 
which many writers have perspiringly bent the shafts of 
their criticism. If it is true that the only actions of any 
value are those determined by the individual conscience, 

1 William James. The Will to Believe, New York, 1911, p. 212. 
* F. H. Giddings, The Principles of Sociology, N. Y., 1908, p. 354. 

3 The Mind of Primitive Man, New York, 1911. p. 247. 

4 The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct, New York, 1898, Vol. II, p. 5. 



84 THE IDEA OF PEKSOKALITY. 

does not this lead to the ridiculous doctrine of the unmean- 
ing character of external things'? To a certain extent, yes. 
But it will help us considerably if we recall the psychological 
doctrine that the world is not set over against the individual 
as if the two were in antagonism. A subject-object rela- 
tion is, of course, impossible without a subject and an object. 
From the angle of ethics it is often advantageous to the eco- 
nomic, political, religious, and the general social situation, 
that the individual conscience should recognize itself as out 
of harmony with existing institutions, if progress is to be 
kept moral. Naturally, there is no intention of apotheosiz- 
ing the egotists, or the "social cripples" of whom Sir 
Charles Waldstein writes. 1 If we are to retain that sensi- 
tiveness to the forces of idealism which makes for advanc- 
ing civilization we must make allowance, in the ethical 
sphere, for the possibility of diverse loyalties much after 
the fashion of what the recent school of Federalists would 
create in the political sphere. Ethical centralization in pub- 
lic opinion would mean the substitution of legislation for 
conscience and convention for personal responsibility. 
Morality would rather be the external observance of pre- 
scribed acts and the spirit in which the acts were performed 
would matter hardly at all. We should be on the level of 
Eome where "superstition" was equivalent to transgress- 
ing the bounds of immemorial custom ; or of Athens, where 
it was dangerous, as Aristides had reason to know, for a 
man to take more than his share of the public virtue. 

In other words, we must forego the smug Greek doc- 
trine of collective wisdom. It is too much to say, with Mr. 
Gilbert Carman, that minorities are always right; but, in 
spite of the high authority of Aristotle, majorities are some- 
times wrong, 2 Aristotle did not have enough faith in hu- 
man nature to make rights a matter of individual recogni- 
tion and respect. 3 A long legal history would seem to bear 
him out. At the same time, if the multitude have generally 
sound moral principles, this fact is as firmly established by 

1 Aristodemocracy, N. Y., 1917, pp. 22S-9. 

"For illustrations of Aristotle's teaching on collective wisdom see Pol. 

Book III. c. II. sects. 14-17 : c. 13. sect. 10 ; c. 15. sect. 7. 
'Pol. Ill, c. II, sect. 19. 



ETHICAL. PERSONALITY. 85 

individual responsibility as by the belief that virtue is a 
cooperative institution in which each man has a "share." 
It is not a mathematical problem at all. We are not bound 
to "throw our ready caps in air" in favor of something that 
the majority has decided by vote, by custom, or by selection, 
natural or otherwise, to be right, just and binding on all. 
Or if we are, there is the danger of a too great devotion to 
expediency which always confronts any social organization 
of which the moral purpose is not at every point instinct 
with the highest motive. 

But personal ethics are not selfish ethics or self-less 
ethics. The Christian Eeligion which constitutes the high- 
est expression of personal morality yet given to the world 
is proof positive of this. It is only a one-sided criticism 
that sees in the sense of personal guilt, the desire of per- 
sonal reward, the striving after personal holiness, nothing 
but an attempt to adorn a "perfumed ego." The reckless 
abandon apparent in the question "What doth it profit a 
man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his 
own soul?" — has probably done more real good for the 
world than the appeal to a merely social altruism will ever 
be able to do. It is a concrete and real appeal. 



CHAPTER SEVEN 

PERSONALITY IN SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY. 

Social personality is the consciousness of our relation 
to other men as person to persons. Briefly, it is a "con- 
sciousness of kind." It is an attempt to harmonize the so- 
cial fact of similarity with the psychological fact of differ- 
ence. Its significance is succinctly expressed in the modern 
doctrine of "service," or in the older Christian precept to 
charity and mutual aid. 

Nothing could be clearer than that we are not absolutely 
discrete individuals. Nor should we establish a false an- 
tagonism between the person and society. They are two 
aspects of one fundamental problem. At the same time, we 
are under some necessity of defining these aspects, all the 
more since there is at present an immense ethical, political, 
and economic importance behind the unit-group relation. 

The definition of society given by the Scholastics does 
not differ essentially from that proposed by the more con- 
servative modern sociologists. Thus, for the former, "so- 
ciety implies fellowship, company and has always been con- 
ceived as signifying a human relation, and not a herding 
of sheep, a hiving of bees, or a mating of wild animals. The 
accepted definition of a society is a stable union of a plural- 
ity of persons co-operating for a common purpose of benefit 
to all. The fulness of co-operation involved naturally ex- 
tends to all the activities of the mind, will, and external 
faculties, commensurate with the common purpose and the 
bond of union; this alone presents an adequate, human 
working together." 1 For the latter, "society, in the origi- 
nal meaning of the word, is companionship, converse, asso- 
ciation; and all true social facts are psychical in their na- 
ture. But mental life in the individual is not more depend- 
ent on physical arrangements of brain and nerve cells than 
social intercourse and mutual effort are dependent on phy- 

1 Charles Macksey, Cath. Ency., XIV. p. 74. 



THE IDEA OF PEKSONALITY. 



sical groupings of the population. It is therefore in keep- 
ing with the nature of things that the word ' society ' means 
also the individuals, collectively considered, who mingle and 
converse, or who are united or organized for any purpose 
of common concern." 1 Hence, society is composed objec- 
tively of three elements : a physical basis in the ' ' groupings 
of population"; a psychical consensus brought about by the 
the interaction of many minds, and a resultant "sum of 
formal relations, in which the associating individuals are 
bound together," which latter constitutes the abstract no- 
tion of society. 

There is considerable variation, naturally, in the appli- 
cation of these ideas, and nowhere is the difference more 
strongly marked than in the attempt to describe the char- 
acter and functioning of the individual within the associa- 
tion. The Schoolmen have always maintained that the per- 
son loses nothing of his title to real and original individual- 
ity by being incorporated into a society. They were con- 
sistent when they carried their metaphysical and psycholog- 
ical conclusions over into the region of the social sciences. 
They did not lift man out of his social relations, as Hobbes 
did in the* Leviathan, nor picture him as the brooding 
non-conformist of Herbert Spencer's Man vs. the State. 
They predicated of the ego, as a necessary condition of its 
perfectibility, the power to socialize itself. They did not 
deny that we ' ' are strengthened and enriched by assimilat- 
ing the experiences of others." 2 On the contrary, they would 
assert that personality attains its full implication only 
through contact with others. But they refused to cut off 
the notion of society from that of the individual, to think 
society as some superior, transcendent entity which, at a 
period of history, descended upon individuals, seized them 
in an all-embracing clasp, and evermore directed their desti- 
nies irresistibly. Most contemporary sociologists, however, 
have lost faith in the categories of Scholasticism. It is not 
clear, though, what kind of individual they would substitute. 
Apparently, he will have no real personality, this being re- 

1 F. H. Giddings, The Principles of Sociology, New York, 1908, p. 3. 

2 G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind : The Study of Psychology, New 

York, p. 165. 



PERSONALITY IN SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY. 89 

garded as the impulse to selfishness and the opponent of 
that whole-hearted cooperation that is now claimed as our 
most vital need. But the way in which personality is de- 
rived from society is nowhere set forth in a convincing 
manner. Herbert Spencer's theory of society as an "or- 
ganism" is regarded as incomplete by even his most ardent 
admirers. The endeavors to state the influence of the ' ' so- 
cial consciousness" and the " social mind" seldom result in 
more than thinking out metaphors. Where expression is 
not obscure, it is crude ; as when we are told that physical 
individuality is a vase into which the contents are poured 
from the social medium. 1 And weakest of all is the view of 
individuality as an accident, a whim of nature alone prevent- 
ing it from being sociality, like James' "famous pebble on 
the Rocky Mountain crest." 2 In fine, one who reads care- 
fully the writings of those who see in all personal life merely 
the results of social origins will miss anything like a definite 
and satisfying theory of how this can be the case. 

The trouble seems to lie in cutting too clean a distinc- 
tion between psychology and sociology. Certainly, if we 
are to have a science of sociology, we must center on the 
facts of solidarity, meeting, similarity, and association. 
But we cannot afford to overlook divergence, distinction, 
difference, and dissociation. A pregnant source of misun- 
derstanding is the logical opposition that has been set up. 
Person is not opposed to the organization, as the unsocial 
to the social. Person is opposed to person, and this anti- 
thesis is itself a social fact which has its proper significance 
in the higher social synthesis. We must recognize that "an 
element of anarchy inheres in the very idea of social or- 
ganization." 3 The most effective way of securing the social 
altruist that seems to be so ardently desired is to socialize 
him up to the point where he loses all sense of difference, a 

1 Arthur James Todd, Theories of Social Progress, N. Y., 1918, p. 56. 

2 The idea that nature hesitates between making an individual and making 

a species is a borrowing from biology. Its worth as an anlogy for so- 
cial phenomena is doubtful since it places causation beyond direct ob- 
servation. See H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, New York, 1911, pp. 
259-261. 

3 H. J. Laski, New Republic, Dec. 21, 1918, p. 229. 



90 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 



sort of human jellyfish who talks of liberty without conflict 
and sacrifice ; of fraternity as if men are never called upon 
to adhere to their principles in lonely isolation, even apart 
from those whom they prize most ; of equality as if he had 
never known that not even herds of animals and shoals of 
fishes furnish exact types of equality. Complete similarity 
would doubtless mean perfect equilibrium, which, no matter 
how valuable in a merely physical world, would be an un- 
desirable social situation. Our social Utopia would then be 
a social Nirvana, what Mr. Ralph Adams Cram would call 
the "nemesis of mediocrity," where "society is unable of 
its own powers, as a whole, to lift itself from the nadir of its 
own uniformity. ' n 

While it is a man's business to contribute what is of 
worth in his personality to the community, only a superficial 
analysis can see that contribution facilitated by deriving 
personality from the environment, by making each mind the 
reflection of the social mind, each will the reflection of the 
social will. It is not worth while to say that, because so- 
ciety gives everything, the individual must return every- 
thing to its generous donor. That bargain-like relation of 
the individual to the group represents solely a static situa- 
tion. Our intellectual and moral inheritance remains rich 
and vital because it is being continually touched, colored, 
and added to by individual initiative and experience. Nor 
is this influence of individuals only a vague and indefinite 
affair. It can be sensed and gauged in such phenomena as 
the injection of new thought into traditions, and in the 
formation of public opinion which is more often than not 
the work of a few leading minds. It is the element of per- 
sonality in life that prevents society from ever becoming 
commensurate with its actual institutions. In Athens, in 
Rome, in the Middle Ages, just as at present, society gave 
all appearance of finality — conservatism in law, rigidity in 
government, absolute adherence to custom and convention. 
"To act," as Cardinal Newman wrote, "you must assume, 
and that assumption is faith." 2 Personality is the source, 

1 The Nemesis of Mediocrity, p. 22. 

2 Discussions and Arguments cm Various Subjects, Art. 4. 



PERSONALITY IN SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY. 91 

if not of the ideas themselves, at least of that passionate 
trust so necessary for making ideas effective; and it is the 
means of kindling in other men sympathy for the things for 
which the ideas stand. All this is true, perhaps, in a more 
special way of those pioneers of thought and conduct who 
have dared to stand alone. It is the history of heroes, 
saints, conquerors, statesmen, preachers, reformers, dream- 
ers in science, art, and politics, fanatics, adventurers. But 
it is also true of the common man; for it is by the appeal of 
personality that he is enabled to recognize in creeds, policies, 
standards, tastes, and ideals the answers to the needs of 
his own individual life. It is reason speaking to reaon, 
heart calling to heart, that breaks ' ' the spell that holds the 
crowd. ' ' 

In brief, the value of personality to society may be 
summed up under the one word, deliberation. In spite of 
all that has been written against M. Le Bon, the collective 
individual is inferior to the isolated individual in that it 
cannot initiate rational discussion. 1 The group possesses 
deliberative power only in an indirect and derived sense. 
Its primary bond and method of integration is feeling. It 
is only by misconceiving the group as something apart, and 
considering as products of its own functioning what are 
really due to the intellectual communication of individuals, 
what are originally the contributions of individual minds, 
that we can assign deliberative action to it. Eeason and dis- 
cussion belong essentially to single minds. It is the effort, 
foresight, and constructive force of individuals which make 
it possible and sure that social evolution will be conscious 
direction, and that development will be rational. It is the 
individuals themselves, and not any transcendent energy 
in society, that produce the regulative action which pre- 
vents the dominance of passion and sentiment; that main- 
tain the corporate body a fit medium for evolving the kind 
of intelligent and responsible personality that alone counts 
for anything. It is the clashes and adjustments of indi- 
vidual consciousnesses, individual minds, individual wills 
that give content and importance to the "phenomenon of 

1 G. Le Bon, Psychologic des foules, Paris, 1895, pp. 16-17. 



92 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

many individual minds in interaction, ' ' which, for want of a 
better, goes by the name of social mind. 1 We must assume 
some power that is able to unsettle and disturb the pall of so- 
cialized thought, values, and choices ; and this power can 
only belong to that sphere over which personality exerts its 
sway. The alternative would be that strange belief of earlier 
evolutionism in irresistible, fatalistic progress. Herbert 
Spencer said that humanity must in the long run go right, 
because it has tried all possible ways of going wrong. This 
is what Mr. More would term l ' a faith in drifting ; a belief 
that things of themselves, by a kind of natural gravity of 
goodness in them, move always on and on in the right di- 
rection; a confiding trust in human nature as needing no 
restraint and compression, but rather full liberty to follow 
its own impulsive desires to expand. ' ,2 

It seems convenient to draw up here a few practical 
conclusions. Personality is assuredly a social, as well as an 
individual, fact. There can never be any condonement of 
selfishness in conduct or solipsism in thought, which " would 
reduce all actuality experienced by the individual mind to 
phases, or phenomena, or self -manifestations, of the indi- 
vidual mind itself as the one and only actuality." 3 But 
neither can there be any excuse for that " tender-minded" 
sentimentalism that is now being preached from the house- 
tops as so much social reform and civic duty, that fancies 
men better and happier when they are equalized by the bal- 
lot or when they are given control of the machinery of pro- 
duction. These are means which the next fifty years may 
change ; means which, no matter how valuable in themselves, 
depend for their efficiency on the character of the men who 
employ them. It is the man that counts, not the methods. 
"Civilization is human progress integrated and intensified. 
Its most essential and characteristic manifestations are dif- 
fusion of culture, a high moral and intellectual level, and 
respect for law. Hence civilization is above all the result of 
the domination of man by himself, it is a work of interior 
culture in which the three civilizing forces par excellence co- 

a F. H. Giddings, op. cit. p. 134. 

'P. E. More, Aristocracy and Justice, preface, viii-ix. 

3 Coffey, Ontology, p. 86. 



PERSONALITY IN SOCIOLOGICAL THEOEY. 93 



operate: religion, art, science." 1 The individual is not 
operate: religion, art, science." 2 The individual is not 
prior in time to society, but he is prior in aim and signifi- 
cance. A society is its individuals, no more and no less. We 
must understand that every individual is a problem of orig- 
inal, active personality. ''Personality is not merely a 
passive consensus of mental states. It reacts on all its 
emotional and intellectual factors. In every sensation and 
perception, in every act of attention and of reasoning, in 
every phase of feeling, personality, the unified resultant of 
all past and present feeling, is itself a factor, making every 
process of thought and feeling something peculiar and in- 
communicable. This reaction of the co-ordinated whole upon 
the parts is especially distinctive of the psychology of man ; 
it differentiates his conscious life from the conscious life of 
lower animals." 2 The bane of our life is a political psy- 
chology that would make men think in masses; a series of 
educational nostrums that insist on training by categories ; 
a growing load of legislation that orientates the community 
with statute morality and considers the matter closed. 
What we must have for inculcating the ideals we have in 
mind are human beings, not books, codes, and bills ; and the 
people most available at present are the teachers, the nurses, 
the doctors, the priests, the small foremen who meet men 
face to face, and heart to heart, who deal with them as in- 
dividuals of flesh and blood, and not simply as social units 
or pieces of a mechanism. If we really desire social reform 
let us pay less heed to millionaire philanthropists, univer- 
sity theorists, and legislative faddists, and give more consid- 
eration, more instruction, more kindly sympathy and more 
wages to that class of lowly leaders, petty officers in the 
army of humanity, who exercise more control, for good or 
bad, over the destinies of the race in one day than our much 
advertised, many-volumed dreamers do in a life-time. 

Another point worth noting is that to make a logical 
surrender of personality to social origins would pave the 
way for absolutism in theory. The great streng*th of the 
notion of " society, " prevalent today, is its alleged superior- 
ity to political organization — the tribe, clan, state, or na- 

1 Dellepiane, Rev. International de Sociologie, Jan., 1912, p. 19. 

2 F. H. Giddings, op. cit., p. 380. 



94 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 



tion; its asserted identity with the best ideals, traditions, 
and aspirations of our common humanity. It is no such 
thing. Bentham is clearly right in his statement that a 
natural society is always practically a political society. 1 We 
may mentally distinguish, as Hegel and Bosanquet did, be- 
tween State and society. We cannot actually cut them in 
two, as Spencer attempted. "Society, after all, is within 
the State, and it has its meaning in the State. It follows 
that, if we take the State in its fuller sense, not as a po- 
litical mechanism using force, but as a general organiza- 
tion and synthesis of life, which includes and correlates all 
other organizations, we shall see it as a group of groups, a 
community of communities, embracing and sustaining the 
whole field of social co-operation. In this sense we can view 
the meaning of the State from two aspects. We can see 
it again as a driving-wheel, giving motive power to the sys- 
tem — as a "force" invigorating by a constant reminder 
and suggestion of their duties every member and every in- 
stitution, and preventing the lethargy and inertia into 
which, without such reminder and suggestion, they might too 
readily fall. Nor can the State act in this second aspect, 
as a force, unless it has present to itself its first aspect of 
itself as a working conception of life as a whole." 2 We can 
see how insensibly the political and the larger social aspects 
fade into one another And this is the anomaly of our life, 
that while States will continually feel it necessary to repress 
initiative in the interests of the larger social bond, crises in 
the personal development of individuals will just as con- 
tinually urge to resistance. Accepting the paradox, we can 
at least see a result where necessary constraints are mini- 
mized, and the largest share of liberty consistent with the 
general welfare assured. But this introduces matter for 
still another discussion. 

3 Fragment on Government, Oxford, 1891. C. I, X, XI. 

2 Ernest Barker, Political Thought from Spencer to Today, New York, 
(Home University Library), pp. 71-72. 



CHAPTER EIGHT 

PERSONALITY IN" POLITICAL THEORY. 

The goal of social functioning is the development of 
human personality. Moreover, personality reacts on social 
structure and cohesion. The two spheres of activity do not 
go on in separate circles, but rather as a circle within a 
circle. In this sense, the individual has worth only in the 
community where alone he has the power of full mental de- 
velopment. Modern social studies should not be denied the 
credit of having emphasized this truism. At the same time, 
the elmentary principles involved do not constitute an area 
in which there is much room for dispute. Society here 
means evidently humanity in all its vast vagueness, the com- 
plexus of associational influences. There is a spaciousness 
about such thinking which will harbor, not uncomfortably, 
all sorts of theories and system ; for what is really meant is 
that man's physical, psychical, intellectual, and moral na- 
ture is not isolated in a vacuum. Even the believer in a real 
personality need not be suspicious, since the mobile, shift- 
ing, dissociating elements, which operate as personal forces 
in society, must converge somewhere if social environment 
can continue to be synonymous with the conditions of a 
higher and more developed life. 

But the problem is not so simple as all this. Social 
forces do not affect the concrete individual through the me- 
dium of humanity in its entirety, but through the medium 
of definite groups. The relations which man enters into 
with his fellows are specialized. The simplest and most ob- 
vious of these groups is the family. The influence of home 
life, even in extensive groups, is always important. The 
relationships of the family originate and foster qualities 
necessary for the maintenance of all true association and, 
furthermore, serve as the practical channel for continuing 
the traditions and accomplishments of each generation. But 
of itself the family does not suffice for drawing out to the 



96 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

full extent the natural faculties of man. Even granting 
that single families are provided by nature with capacities 
and energies for promoting their own welfare, the scope 
of this welfare is extremely narrow and its character ele- 
mental, as may be seen today in the more sparsely settled 
sections of the country. 

At most there would be satisfaction of the mere demands 
of physical survival, together with the stunted beginnings 
of intellectual and moral growth, but hardly any perception 
of aesthetic values. 1 There are not enough interests to 
create the ideals, aspirations, and enthusiasms which result 
in all those coordinated forms of activity, industrial, de- 
votional, deliberative, scientific, artistic, educational, and 
recreational — which we now recognize as the conditions of 
full personal expression. These wants are partly supplied 
by minor groups of all sorts, but we do not apparently have 
a situation of possibilities for the attainment of complete 
life until society by considerable differentiation and organi- 
zation has emerged in the State. 

Thus, we come back once more to the notion of an All, 
an Absolute. The passion for ultimate monism has been the 
distinguishing feature of prevalent political theory. Even 
now those who deny that a State is unitary and its sover- 
eignty single constitue but a handful of heretics. 2 Nor is 
the desire for unity in politics without a certain justification. 
It certainly exercised a social value in combating the exag- 
gerated individualism of such thinkers as Herbert Spencer. 3 
' n the positive side, its primary principle is one by which 
all political speculation gets started. This is none other 
than the Aristotelian teaching that the State must be co- 
extensive with developed life and that its action can only be 
measured by human necessities and the inability of man to 
provide for those necessities. 4 There is no intention of crush- 
ing the individual. On the contrary, every one who has as- 
serted the inclusion of all life's relations within the State 

1 M. Cronin, The Science of Ethics, Vol. II, pp. 468-463. 

2 Generally speaking, the Federalists who favor decentralization and view 

the state as a system of "groups." 
8 Social Statics, 1850 ; The Man Versus the State, 1885. 
4 For a Scholastic application of this principle see Cronin, op. cit.. II, 

pp. 472-477. 



PERSONALITY IIST POLITICAL THEORY. 97 



has done so because he conceived that full personal ex- 
pansion is in some way dependent on unrestricted sover- 
eignty. The grounds lie ready-made in certain social, his- 
torical, and moral facts. The State carries with it its own 
impulse to self-sufficiency, of which military organization, 
economic organization, juridical organization and political 
differentiation are but the external expression. It has a 
qualitative character as a social whole which is possessed in 
virtue of its own constitution, and not simply because in- 
dividuals are quantitively present to one another. Funda- 
mentally, the State is a moral society, seeking to realize a 
moral aim, but the very conditions which assure the realiza- 
tion of this aim postulate the existence of social laws, with 
the restriction that the laws must not be expressed in the 
mechanical terms of force but in the organic terms of life. 
Furthermore, the scanty evidences that history grudgingly 
brings to the problem show that the state is a spontaneous 
growth. It could not have been the object of formal thought 
from the beginning for the reason that men would not strive 
after - ' conditions of which they never had experience, more 
particularly conditions which it would be difficult to conjure 
up in imagination without experience. ' n In the beginning, 
thinks Bryce, men were forming institutions under which to 
live, before they were conscious of what they were doing. 2 
All this is not equivalent to going, with Comte, to the limit 
of saying that a State is wholly the result of unconscious 
action. 3 What is meant is that the State would be the 
product not so much of one rationally conceived design as 
of many converging acts of human reason. The State could 
never have been entirely beyond the realm of human rea- 
son. 4 The stages that led to its formation would be conse- 
quences of conscious effort endeavoring to meet growing 

1 Cronin, op. cit., II, p. 467. 

2 Studies in History and Jurisprudence, Oxford, 1901, II. 97. It will be 

interesting to compare the same author's view of sovereignty as con- 
straining power, lb., II, 56. 

8 Positive Philosophy. Accepted in a modiiied form by J. R. Seeley, Intro- 
duction to Political Science, New York. 

4 Under the inspiration of such writers as Leslie Stephen and Walter Bage- 
hot spiritual evolution has tended to usurp the place formerly held by 
biological evolution and, what Professor Todd pointedly calls, its "belly 
problems." 



98 THE IDEA OF PEESONAXITY. 



wants. It would "glide imperceptibly into existence as men 
became successively aware of the various needs bound up 
with their nature. ' n The implication is that the State rep- 
resents the de facto evolution of de iure presumptions, and 
that it is not only ideally but actually commensurate with 
the relations of human life. Finally, the whole scheme is 
not without ethical confirmation, since liberty must be con- 
fined, not only in the interests of peace and security, but as 
a means to the acquisition of a truer and deeper liberty of 
cooperation. 

The case of philosophico-political absolutism and legal 
supremacy seems complete. A State functioning properly 
up to the measure of its high purposes must have unquali- 
fied allegiance, all-embracing sovereignty. Thus, Fabian So- 
cialists will urge the State to take into its hands the control 
of economic life. Eugenists advocate State control of physi- 
cal life. Philosophers like Hegel, Green, Bradley, and Bosan- 
quet, and literary men like Carlyle, Euskin, and Arnold, 
will have it that men take their moral and mental life from 
the community. And attaining a new content and vindication 
as a result of this unifying tendency is the legal conception 
of sovereignty, which confers "on the ruler of the State a 
positive right of supreme rule, a right to command and di- 
rect the people in everything necessary for the good of the 
body politic." The extremes to which "uncritized in- 
dividualism" went, perhaps render us more willing to see 
the elements of truth in all these extensions of State action. 
We are not inclined now to preach non-intervention as the 
supreme duty of the State, or to identify political influence 
with mere police power. A situation where hygienic laws 
may or may not be observed, where the aims of education 
are often shipwrecked on the haphazard methods of private 
mangement, where morality is left to a good-will that exper- 
ience has frequently shown to be hypothetical, where unreg- 
ulated competition results in the dominance of the strong 
over the weak, will always cause many sincere minds to 
doubt the validity of the aphorism, carried over from eco- 
nomics, that a man 's interests, generally speaking, are 

'W. L. Newman, The Politics of Aristotle, Oxford, Introduction, I, 27. 



PERSONALITY IN POLITICAL THEORY. 99 



looked after more efficiently by himself than by others. And 
yet, if our theories are to be true to the facts of life, and not 
solely mechanical, we must admit that the individual will de- 
mand a voice in his own fulfilment, that we must deal not 
with oneness but with plurality, not with a whole but with 
parts. The concrete right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit 
of happiness" cannot be sacrificed to the Moloch of abstract 
Monism. 

The State of ideal synthesis is very different from the 
•State of historical and juridical study. The latter is a defi- 
nite geographical area, enclosing a group of individuals, 
living under a system of law, and possessing an authority 
capable of enunciating and enforcing that law. Its sover- 
eignty is one, and antecedently above the parts of the com- 
munity only in the abstract sense that, granting a body poli- 
tic, there must be a power for discovering and realizing the 
purposes of the community Concretely, its supremacy is 
not absolute and apriori, but a matter of gradual achieve- 
ment. Authority has its source in the God-given nature 
of the State ; but the authority that we know, that actually 
rules us, is one that has been artificially created. 1 It is a 
human institution, and the only kind of sovereignty that will 
be worth anything is that which is acquired by remaining 
true to human instincts. A State has what of sovereignty 
it earns, and it earns only by taking into account the funda- 
mental dictates of human nature, in a word, intelligence and 
consent. Probing to the very roots of the matter, sover- 
eignty depends on the authority that can be exercised and 
this in turn depends on the obedience that will be rendered. 2 
This should not be mistaken for the charter of a Utopia. 
Force is undoubtedly an element in the State, and coercion, 
physical or economic, has its proper place. But here again 
we have to concede that the sovereign authority that uses 

1 Authority and government are not essentially convertible, as Pope Leo 

writes in his letter on The Christian Constitution of States, reprinted 
by the Catholic Truth Societv, The Pope and the People, London, 1903, 
pp. 67-68. 

2 This is not carrying over the doctrine of irresponsibility or of private 

judgment to the sphere of politics. The classic expression of the Cath- 
olic doctrine of sovereignty in its relations to allegiance and conscience 
is reached, perhaps in Cardinal Newman's Letter to the Duke of Nor- 
folk, 



100 THE IDEA OP PEKSONALITY. 

force "must in the ultimate analysis be reduced to the so- 
ciety itself, or rather to the common consciousness of a com- 
mon end which constitutes the society. ' n 

If we are forced to offer a theory of the State that cov- 
ers the presumptions adduced, we have one available in the 
views of Suarez. The Spanish theologian urged that from 
the beginning, and by natural law, political authority vests 
in the ' ' corpus communitatis. " It is primarily an attribute 
of the whole body, and only secondarily and derivatively 
an attribute of the position of ruler. Sovereignty, central- 
ized in the legal State, is originally diffused through the 
whole body politic. It is not a discrete solid adjusted to 
States. It is, as it were, an evaporation and crystallization. 
It attains its substantiality, negatively, by the recognition 
that the interests of the group are better conserved through 
the use of agents ; and, positively, by the determination as to 
who shall be the agents. This theory is more than the asser- 
tion that authority lies somewhere in the State. It is more 
than a mere political doctrine that the ultimate de iure 
sovereign is the people. It is also the application of the 
ethical truth that what supports and guarantees sovereignty 
is a spiritual force represented by the common conscience 
and the common convictions of the human beings who com- 
prise the State. 2 

5 Quoted from Ernest Barker's review of T. H. Green's philosophy in Po- 
litical Thought from Spencer to Today, N. Y., p. 37. 

2 Suarez, Defensio Fidei Catholicae, Bk. Ill, C. II, see. 5. Cardinal Bellar- 
mine defended the same theory in De Laicis, Bk. Ill, c. 6. Suarez was 
not attempting, despite various ideas of which he makes use, to give 
the historical, but the philosophical, origin of the state. Certainly we 
do not disprove his theories by quoting Sir Henry Maine against him. 
He was less interested in the temporal antecedents of the state than 
in their logical presuppositions. The objection which some rest on the 
asserted parity between authority in the family and authority in the 
State does not seem to be valid. In the first place, the relations in a 
State are not so much like absolute dependence, as in the case of par- 
ent and child, as mutual dependence, such as exists between husband 
and wife. Secondly, subordination of children to parents is due pri- 
marily to reasons of physical orgin and survival. If the latter were 
typical of the state, we should probably have to find the ideal state in 
an Assyrian despotism, where, as Rawlinson tells us, the king controlled 
the sources of economic life. Reasoning on this line we should be com- 
pelled to admit that the State finds its explanation in the impact of 
force with weakness and that political dominance is the result of eco- 
nomic exploitation (Franz Oppenheimer, The State, Eng. Tr., Indianap- 
olis, p. 68). 



PEKSONALITY IN POLITICAL THEOEY. 101 



Whether or not this theory satisfies, a sovereignty that 
implicity denies the priority of moral postulates on grounds 
of an assumed unity is unreal. Political monism is con- 
ceptual only. Legal monism is mechanical. Both have this 
in common with philosopohical monism, that they accept a 
purely abstract view of reality as adequate. For that rea- 
son they are both insufficient. The reality whereby things 
agree is also the reality whereby they differ. 1 Nowhere in 
actual life do we find omnipotence and all-inclusiveness. 
There are areas of activity over which we find no difficulty 
in asserting State supremacy. There are other activities 
that are political, only if we take for granted that all social 
relations are essentially political relations. 2 While, if we 
consider that broad field of conduct over which, for example, 
States and Churches have quarrelled in the past, we might 
well wonder if we have not here a practical reduction to ab- 
surdity of any Hegelian pretentions. Platonic idealism on 
which the whole monistic structure rests can be destroyed 
by one conscientious objector; and while we might kill the 
rebel, his death, as Koyer Collard would perhaps say, would 
still remain an argument. Had we never any experiences 
of loyalties higher than those due the State, we might yet 
come to rebellion, as Buckle did, from the side of physics, 
or, as Huxley and Benjamin Kidd did, from the side of bio- 
logical morality. If in the concrete State there is a region 
of undeniable supremacy, this must be accounted for by the 
fact that up to this point, at least, human needs and aspira- 
tions have been interpreted by the State "with sufficient 
wisdom to obtain general acceptance, and no further. ' ' If, 
on the other hand, there is a sphere where individuals still 
resist all encroachments of the State, where men stand by 
their church or union or other organization against the 
State, this must be because the latter has not been able to 
detect and generalize the claims of personality that are at 
stake. The part represents better than the whole certain 

1 For the value of this contention against philosophical monism see Coffey, 

Ontology, p. 125. 

2 Mr. Laski writes that "because a group or an individual is related to 

some other group or individual it is not thereby forced to enter into 
relations with every other part of the body politic." (Studies in the 
Problem of Sovereignty, Yale Press, 1917, p. 10). 



102 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

interests of the man, and so he throws his allegiance against 
the ideal custodian of his rights. 

Such consideration will always have an added signifi- 
cance from the caution which most men exercise when it is 
question of increasing the scope of governmental interfer- 
ence, and of so opening the door for the unconscious trans- 
fer of uncontrolled absolutism to a body of officials who are 
in practical life the respositories of whatever supremacy we 
predicate of the State. 1 A certain native shrewdness will 
constantly assert itself to prevent all absorbing ideas from 
creeping into the philosophy of governments. We shall be 
less inclined to take our theories from Hobbes, and more dis- 
posed to imitate the old Roman sagacity which "knew noth- 
ing of a special divine grace granted to a particular family, 
or of any sort of mystical charm by which a king should be 
made of different stuff than other men. ' ' 2 There is always 
the danger that absolutism will become force glorified, that 
it will ally itself with the automatic and coercive elements 
of the State. Simultaneous conduct, evoked in the presence 
of the same conditions, on which the State relies to keep its 
external form intact, and the sense of dependence that ac- 
counts for the possibility of coercion, are necessary factors. 
But there is, as Edmund Burke observed, a moral State 
within the geographical State. A State's vitality will be 
conditioned ultimately by its ability to control the free 
minds and wills of its citizens and to earn for its regulations 
the sanctions of conscience. It would be suicidal for a State 
to base its legislative and executive action solely on the un- 
conscious, unreflecting coordinations of routine life, or to 
hope that its aims can always be carried out by force, In 
a word, a developed State should be a voluntary association, 
and its sovereignty maintained by moral forces chiefly. 

1 For the Catholic doctrine of governmental interference, see Cronin, op. cit., 
II, pp- 477-491. 

2 Momrasen, History of Romp, Eng. Tr., Vol. I, p. 84. This principle per- 
sisted in the political theory of the Roman Empire. (Institutes, 1, 2, 
0). Catholics will remember that the mediaeval theologians also op- 
posed any divine right of kings. The defense of this doctrine became 
the perhaps unwelcome task of lesser men in an age when churchmen 
had become courtiers. For a striking summary of the mediaeval ad- 
herence to the "democratic basis of all human authority," see F. W. 
Bus?ell, Christian Theology and Social Progress (Bampton Lectures 
for 1905), London, 1907, p. 59. 



PERSONALITY IN POLITICAL THEORY. 103 



Naturally, when we begin to suspect that sovereignty 
may mean more than what is contained within the narrow 
dimensions of actual rule or more than the regulation of 
externals by force, we sacrifice the benefits of legal clear- 
ness. But that sacrifice may be necessary to obtain a deeper 
and more progressive grasp on the fundamental facts of po- 
litical life. 1 Realistic analysis, interested principally in the 
concept of the State, emphasizes the power of supremacy 
which secures, even at the cost of coercion, the moral end of 
the body politic. Ethical analysis is not more concerned 
for the vindication of authority than it is for the grounds 
that justify obedience. And when we read in eminent au- 
thorities that the sovereignty of the State extends to every 
kind of act, that anything that the State desires to do, it 
has a right to do, it is time to recognize that sovereignty is 
referable to the same roots as those from which obedience 
springs, and that there is not one moral law for the State 
and another for the citizens. It is nothing short of des- 
potism to make legal right equivalent to moral right., 2 

We shall probably have to distinguish moral (or nat- 
ural) rights from civil rights, just as we shall constantly 
have to restrict sovereignty in practical life to legal suprem- 
acy. The supreme fallacy would lie in our attributing all 
rights to civil processes, or in conceding an unreal pre- 
eminence to sovereignty. 3 Laws represent definite moral 
accomplishments. But there is a vast deal of morality in 
the State that cannot "be brought to book." "The legal 
is the moral cooled and stationary; the moral shows us the 



"Law defines existing legal rights ; Ethics defines moral rights ; Politics 
defines those moral rights which would be legally enforceable, if law 
were what it ought to be." — Jethro Brown, Underlying Principles of 
Modern Legislation, p. 192. 

There is a difference between the situation here suggested and that other 
situation in which the State, in virtue of certain acts, creates an ob- 
ligation in conscience. For an illustration of the latter see: John A. 
Ryan, Distributive Justice, N. Y., 1916, p. 202, and the theologians 
there referred to. 

The extent and character of natural rights need to be clearly understood. 
"Natural rights" is a phrase that the people delight to linger on and 
that orators seize when they desire "to talk large." For a brief and 
transparent exposition of the Catholic doctrine, John A. Ryan, Dis- 
tributive Justice, pp. 56-58. 



104 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

same element still fluid and energetic, shapeless and indefi- 
nite, but alive. The total fact is the social life of the world, 
where the principle of progress is, in a healthy State, always 
in union with the principle of order, the dynamical always 
keeping up the statical." Law is but the deposit, the fixed 
result of the operation of that native power of intuition, 
which, "while still heaving shapelessly, is called morality. 
In the actual world they are never wholly separate; one 
without the other is dangerous to the community." 1 We 
can be less dramatic and say that the social problem must be 
solved from within the individual, the region of morality, 
and not from without, the sphere of law. 

But when we thus shift the center of importance once 
more to the individual, it is not the isolated individual that 
is considered, not the individual of Hobbes' and Rousseau's 
hypothetical State of nature, but the individual as solidary 
with his fellows. With this borne in mind, there is no rea- 
son why we cannot say that no allegiance is entire. None is 
absolute. Even Catholics will restrict the allegiance due 
the Pope to spiritual matters, and the inability to get this 
into the heads of statesmen shows how prevalent is the mis- 
conception of sovereignty. Everywhere there is the pos- 
sibility of conflict and resistance. A State-sovereignty that 
struts on the stilts of omnipotence very properly invites de- 
struction. This does not mean anarchy unless we are will- 
ing to include St. Thomas, Innocent IV, and Suarez under 
the head of anarchists. What is meant is that a man cannot 
surrender his personality. He cannot forget that it exists. 
His personality must be won over, not coerced ; and it can 
only be won over by recognizing its rightful claims. There 
is good ground to believe that we are beginning to appre- 
ciate this fundamental necessity. We now put faith in the 
importance of smaller groups to which the individual spon- 
taneously attaches himself. We believe in the regenerative 
value of the neighborhood. We crave more vigor and in- 
terest in local politics. We are anxious that educational 
systems should be more locally responsive. We everywhere 
are seeking aims and methods that are more human, that 

1 William Wallace, Lectures and Essays, Oxford Ed., 1898, p. 259. 



PERSONALITY IN POLITICAL THEORY. 105 

reflect better human conditions and human needs. One 
thing further is required — that self-improvement be de- 
scribed as radically the work of the man, and not the result 
of changed surroundings. On this point the words of Dr. 
E. T. Shanahan, of the Catholic University, may be used as 
a fitting conclusion: "Planning a perfect State is not so 
much like novel- writing that one may manage the characters 
at will, and make all the future citizens of Altruria auto- 
matically good and moral, merely by the literary expedient 
of arranging all the circumstances to that end beforehand, 
and by killing off the marplots and undesirables before the 

last and crowning chapter is reached Morality is not 

transferred to the individual from the external conditions 
under which he lives. It does not exist ready made in any 

surroundings Custom and circumstances may indeed 

modify morality for good or ill, but it is beyond their power 

to create it Character is something we have to work 

for in any situation, not a magically bestowed gift. And 
until the social optimist of the day can show that custom 
and circumstance may create morality, as well as modify it, 
he has not advanced a single step in the direction of proving 
his Utopian thesis." 1 

1 The Unconsidered Remainder, The Catholic World for Feb., 1914, p. 585. 



CHAPTER NINE 

PERSONALITY IN ECONOMIC THEORY. 

No sensible view of human life will minimize the im- 
portance of a sound physical basis for personality. It is 
worse to be a mental slave than an economic slave. But it is 
is better to be neither. Normally, we have no right to ex- 
pect that personality can mature to fruitful fulness on any 
other antecedents than health, security, sufficiency, and con- 
genial environment. An East Side slum should regularly 
turn out individuals with dwarfed minds and a lowered 
moral vitality that is not altogether unconnected with the 
causes that have produced a lessening of the physical vital- 
ity. If there are occasional roses in the desert of such lo- 
calities, this merely shows that personality is a force that 
is hard to kill. Artistic accomplishment, far-reaching am- 
bition, and high moral achievement are sometimes found in 
strange surroundings. Morbid sentimentalists find a pecu- 
liar delight in cataloguing instances lhat prove an empty 
stomach and a hectic cheek to be a most efficient inspiration 
to genius ; and that, on the whole, it is better to feed stones 
instead of bread to our poets, philosophers, and artists. 
Such statistics are a record of shame. Doubtless, much of 
this is cynicism. But it is not materialism. At present ma- 
terialism lies all on the other side, on the side of those who 
are trying to justify the harsh inequalities of material life, 
who are interested in maintaining the existing personality- 
killing situation, who prefer a pork-butcher to a teacher, a 
machine to a man, a steel rail to an idea ; who regard human 
nature as something outside economic calculation. And no 
matter how much reformers may differ as to methods, they 
at least agree that spiritual values are the ultimate aim. A 
comparatively recent expression of Fabian Socialism may 
serve to illustrate the kind of thoughts that are actuating 
the men who are trying to realize the material well-being of 
mankind. The manifesto of the British Labor Party con- 



108 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 



tains this announcement: "From the same source ('the 
surplus above the standard of life') must come the greatly 
increased public provision that the labor party will insist 
on being made for scientific investigation and original re- 
search, in every branch of knowledge, not to say also for the 
promotion of music, literature, and fine art, which have been 
under capitalism so greatly neglected, and upon which, so 
the labor party holds, any real development of civilization 
fundamentally depends. Society, like the individual, does 
not live by bread alone — does not live for perpetual wealth 
production. ' n 

Technical economics discusses, indeed, a material sit- 
uation. Its problems have to do "primarily with contem- 
porary conditions and with relations between self-support- 
ing individuals and families and the goods upon which their 
well-being depends. ' ' Briefly, it treats ' ' of that portion of 
human activity which is concerned with making a living." 2 
But we should miss much that is valuable in recent economic 
speculation if we did not perceive that economic activity is 
viewed as solidary with the rest of life, and not regarded 
as an isolated sphere, the facts and conditions of which are 
irrevocably beyond human control. This is why most 
thoughtful and sincere men are disposed to be concerned 
less with consumption and more with production, less with 
goods and more with self-developing activities, less with 
mechanical laws and more with the tastes of individuals. 
What impresses the lay reader is the readiness with which 
everybody is recognizing that economic reform is in most es- 
sential aspects moral reform. The worker is spoken of as a 
human being. His personality must not be degraded. He 
must have easier access to material goods by their more 
even distribution through society, not alone because this is a 
canon of justice, but also because he must be put in a posi- 
tion to appreciate higher goods. 

A view of the economic situation from the side of the 
individual will never again, perhaps, include the excesses of 
that individualism which preceded the period around 1880. 
To attempt a new edition of Herbert Spencer's "The Man 

a The New Republic, February 16th, 1918. 

2 Henry Rogers Seager, Principles of Economics, New York, 2nd ed., p. 1. 



PEKSONALITY IN ECONOMIC THEOKY. 109 

Versus the State" is to invite harsh laughter from review- 
ers, criticis, and the majority of an enlightened reading pub- 
lic. 1 Everybody vies with everybody else in exposing the 
political, economic, and moral fallacies of a doctrine that 
was once associated with not a few eminent names. 

At least, this is the condition in circles of speculation. 
In practical life theories move more slowly. Men still cling 
to many principles of the former individualistic philosophy. 
Every encroachment of the State is widely discussed, some- 
times resisted, and never adopted without considerable ad- 
justment. It is this tardy action that made the older so- 
cialists advocate revolution, and that makes their success- 
ors crave an entirely new State. It is true that in trying 
to put a new situation on an old legal system, we are con- 
structing a patchwork product. At the same time, there is 
something deeper. There is a conflict of two ideals — the 
individual and society. Both have something of the truth. 
We cannot insulate the individual from his society, political, 
economic, or otherwise. That is half the truth. We cannot 
absorb the individual in society. That is the other half. 
For the hundredth time, the problem is one of reconcilia- 
tion. 

It is but natural that an era of transition should be 
also one of reactions ; that, in the present case, the language 
of individualism should give way to social phraseology; 
that initiative, originality, competition, and private owner- 
ship should make a less forcible appeal to thought than de- 
pendence, cooperation, and State-control. Whatever else 
socialism may be, it is not a mere offensive intruder. It 
arose in response to a definite need, however mistaken the 
direction which it took. In its earlier Utopian and revo- 
lutionary phases a protest against patent injustice, it has 
settled down, under the form designated Fabian, to the level 
of practical economic and political discussion on collectivist 
principles. The socialization of all rents and the establish- 
ment of a purely democratic State are the main objectives. 
"The wealth which has been created by the whole society 

1 Any one who remembers a rather recent edition of Spencer's work by 
Truxton Beale, and the criticisms, will appreciate at once the present 
drift of thought. 



110 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

must be owned and administered by the whole society. The 
private owner of rent, whether it was drawn from land 01 
industry, was able to dictate the conditions of life to his 
'hands'; the State, as owner, will equally be able to dictate 
conditions. Only if the State which dictates conditions to 
workers is itself the workers, will freedom be attained. 
Then, and then only, will those who own the means of pro- 
duction be also the users of those means; then, and then 
only, will the people dictate to itself the conditions of such 
use." 1 Efficiency will demand that such a State have ex- 
pert government, and the Fabians have given a good deal 
of thought to this aspect of the question. 2 

With the political and economic elements of the Fabian 
creed, we are not, however, directly concerned. The pre- 
sumption is that the individual would be better off where the 
forces of political and economic control are put within his 
grasp. That is not the whole solution, but it is an impor- 
tant part of the solution. Much controversial material for- 
merly urged against socialism would now show not only bad 
taste but lack of information. Where we have been sensi- 
tive to instruction, for example, we realize that government 
ownership is not necessarily socialistic ; and that, even if it 
were, it would not necessarily be wasteful and unintelligent. 
Many men who are as far from socialism as one pole is from 
another will agree that the socialist is right in much of his 
analysis and that the " machine" which he proposes as a 
remedy would eliminate the particular evils of society ; and, 
to repeat Mr. Hilaire Belloc, "would (until it grew rusty) 
grind out sufficiency and security for all In every pris- 
on, school, workhouse, we can see for ourselves officials 
working such machines without too much self-seeking, con- 
trolled by a system of checks from too much private advan- 
tage." 3 

What any believer in real personality wants to know 



1 E. Barker, Political Thought from Spencer to Today, New York, p. 217. 

2 For instance, James Ramsay Macclonald, Socialism and Government, 1909. 

Other aspects of Fabianism, S. Webb, History of Trades Unionism, 
N. Y., 1916, and Industrial Democracy, N. Y., 1902 ; Graham Wallas, The 
Great Society, New York, 1914. 

3 Socialism and the Servile State, The Catholic World, April, 1917, p. 17. 



PERSONALITY LST ECONOMIC THEORY. Ill 

is the philosophy that is behind socialist economics and pol- 
itics. What he seeks to discover is how far the man has 
been brought into the scheme, what elements of human na- 
ture have been emphasized; what, if any, have been neg- 
lected. He denies that any plan, no matter how superficial- 
ly attractive, can be permanently effective unless allowance 
is made for all that the man is. Socialism, under Karl 
Marx, began to be conceived biologically ; and of late years 
Fabian Socialism has given even greater evidence of loyalty 
to biological phrases and analogies. Society is a living- 
organism, it declares, though there is much of the thought 
of Spencer devoted to an opposite purpose. Economically, 
society is creating values, either by its mere growth or by 
its manifold activities. Politically, it is a unity with a 
"general will." The social organism has a life of its own. 
It changes from tvithin according to the laws of its own be- 
ing. How does the individual fit in? He has a definite part 
in the division of labor and in the common life. Only there 
is much more than in the Spencerian metaphor, which lacked 
ethical possibilities. The individual may be identified with 
some one or other of particular social activities, but he is 
affected by the whole round of interests in the social organi- 
zation. The social division of labor is not only an economic 
gain, but a mental and moral benefit as well. It gives life 
an aim. It ensures discipline and thoroughness. It affords 
enjoyment for more hours of leisure. It equalizes opportu- 
nity for all. It is biology mixed with a great deal of Greek 
paternalism. The individual has no place and function of 
his own. He has no rights of his own. He has no ability 
to carve out a fortune of his own. This external entity, the 
Society, must be continually taking him by the hand, direct- 
ing his course, managing his affairs, allotting his tasks and 
duties. 

Leaving aside the question of the validity of the or- 
ganic conception of society, of the difficulty of showing that 
a parallel between the individual organism and the social 
organism is necessarily a relation, it may still be urged that 
State-socialism is forced by its method to ignore many hu- 
man elements in the problem. There is, perhaps, a tend- 
ency to exaggerate the material factors, to believe too much 



112 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

in mechanical laws. We must suspect that something has 
gone wrong when, after having set out to give the individual 
control of day-to-day conditions, we end by having no in- 
dividual at all. Ethical writers have continually pointed 
out this defect. "The State is an inner outgrowth of so- 
ciety," writes Dr. E. T. Shanahan, for instance, "not an 
external imposition upon it. It has no existence apart from 
individual, human beings. These it was who gave it form 
and constitution, under the laws of nature and of God. And 
certainly, if history counts for anything in reaching a con- 
elusion on the matter, it was not to put a premium on medi- 
ocrity, or to reduce all men to the dullest, lowest level of 
their kind, that the State came originally into existence. A 
protest should be filed against the present levelling-down 
movement of socialism, which attempts to carry over the 
personal rights of man to the column of social duties, in a 
ledger badly in need of balancing. The individual, as an 
individual, has personal rights and duties, distinct from 
those which entail upon him as a social being, as a member 
of society. These personal rights cannot be invaded. So- 
ciality is not the only attribute of man, all Tory thinkers, 
past and present, to the contrary notwithstanding. The 
duty of the State is to protect the individual, not to absorb 
him and his, body and soul, by extending the right of emi- 
nent domain to everybody and everything within its borders. 
The social problem must be viewed and solved from within 
the individual, not from without. Human conditions can 
neither lastingly nor effectively be improved by changing 
the internal problem of reforming the character of indi- 
viduals, into the external problem of reforming their en- 
vironment. This is to stand the social problem on its head ; 
to invite us to view and solve it upside down. ' n 

But moralists are not alone in their attacks on State- 
socialism. They find many allies among economists and po- 
litical theorists. We hear a great deal, say the latter, of large 
and suggestive principles, of the revolution of national 
finances, of the conscription of surplus wealth, of the demo- 
cratic control of industry. But all these depend on a politi- 

1 The Unconsidered Remainder, The Catholic World, February 1914, p. 587. 



PERSONALITY IN ECONOMIC THEOEY. 113 

cal disposition that must involve a governing class, if an- 
archy is to be avoided. The fact that that class is elected 
does not alter the final situation.' It is an oligarchy, or it will 
become one at last, whether we look at it economically or po- 
litically. It controls the life of the citizen. It inaugurates 
what Mr. Belloc calls the ' ' Servile State. ' ' No opprobrious 
meaning necessarily attaches here to ' ' servile. ' ' All that is 
meant is that the individual is compelled, that he is not 
actually in possession of his daily life to anything like the 
extent that the socialistic program promised. Officials of 
the State replace the managers of capitalism. The owner- 
ship of the means of production is theoretical, as far as the 
individuals are concerned, while their administration of 
those means is dictated. The individual can in a round-a- 
bout political way assert his influence as part of the body 
politic, but most men entertain no illusions concerning the 
vote in such circumstances. In a word, the argument used 
against the old socialism is that the ideal of a political-in- 
dustrial machinery gives no assurance that the status of the 
worker will be changed. Moralist and economist come to 
the same conclusion that a change in the industrial environ- 
ment will not bring with it, of necessity, a change in the in- 
dividual. 

Most important at present among the theories that 
would be substituted for State-socialism is the doctrine of 
Guild-socialism. The latter is making rapid headway and 
has by now an extensive literature. 1 Guild socialists would 
avoid the crudities of the old individualism by vesting the 
actual ownership of the means of production in the State, 
and the dehumanizing tendencies of State-socialism by 
making the control of productive processes a matter for the 
self-government of each trade. ' ' The whole effort is to re- 
late the individual to his work in the capacity of a human 
being not merely endowed with rights and responsibilities, 
but actually translating them into the terms of everyday 
life." It is with groups, however, rather than with indi- 



1 G. D. H. Cole (8 elf -Government in Industry, London, 1918), shares with 
A. Orage (National Guilds, N. Y., 1914), the position of spokesman for 
the new movement. 



114 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 



viduals that the guild socialist deals. 1 Convinced that a 
political democracy is vain unless there be a true economic 
democracy, they leave the economic affairs to guilds, mem- 
bership in which is determined by occupation or profession. 
Each guild is an area of separate administration. And it 
is believed, without here going into reasons which suggest 
themselves, that the control by the workers themselves of 
their work becomes more effective. This arrangement will 
insure political freedom, since "economic power precedes 
and controls political power. ' ' It will also insure spiritual 
freedom, for the things of the spirt, fine art, education, jus- 
tice, public conduct, international relations, are left to a 
State, released from financial anxiety and undominated by 
the sinister interests that mark a state-control of economic 
life and that perpetuate a struggle characterized by selfish- 
ness and exploitation, in which the many barely survive, the 
few enjoy nearly everything, and the perception and appre- 
ciation of spiritual values is reduced to the vanishing point. 
Where, on the other hand, men are united in cooperative 
labor on guild principles, it is asserted that we shall have 
the basis for a richer personal artistic, and economic life. 

The guild idea is, no doubt, beautiful. Read with the 
help of Mr. Arthur Penty's aesthetic inspiration, it is irre- 
sistible. 1 Any one bred on Catholic traditions will feel 
spontaneously the charm of this mediaeval institution. Nat- 
urally, he will realize that conditions have changed ; that, as 
the stock objections show, thought must be somewhat wider 
than craftsmanship, local industries, and small markets, in 
order to secure the emancipation of workmen who are 
thrown into a situation where machinery, the necessity of 
continued access to raw materials, transportation, and an 
extensive foreign trade are inevitable elements. But go- 
ing further, Catholic economists would be more inclined than 
any others to remember that the guilds were not perfect, 
that no matter how stringent were the rules to promote fair 
dealings, fraternal relations among the members, and regard 

1 Guild socialism owes considerable of its power to the doctrine of the "real 
personality" of the group, for the introduction of which into English 
thought F. W. Maitland is largely given credit. 

1 "Old Worlds for New." 



PERSONALITY IN ECONOMIC THEOEY. 115 

for the interests of the trade as a whole, selfishness, com- 
mercial trickery, unlawful monopoly, and disregard of the 
rights of those outside the ring were not infrequently mani- 
fested. There is no reason for thinking that guilds will be 
immune from the defects that went with similar institutions 
in the thirteenth century. So long as we must conceive eco- 
nomic man in some social relation, the guilds have, perhaps, 
possibilities not possessed by other groups ; but the status 
with which guilds are ideally synonymous is not brought 
about simply by economic and political processes. 

Here we have one reason why the Catholic economist is 
inclined to insist that a moral regeneration must precede 
any lasting and effective social regeneration. It is not suf- 
ficient that the individual be recognized and appointed the 
real center of importance, unless we take care that the in- 
dividual will be equipped with an ethical character adequate 
to sustain and further the system of social justice at which 
everybody is aiming. No plan of political or economic ad- 
justment can proceed without reference to morality. It is 
not enough to hope that the ultimate disposition of things 
will involve an arrangement that will be equivalent to a 
moral order. There must be morality at. the beginning and 
middle, before we can expect morality at the end. And so- 
cial morality has its grounds in individual morality. Such 
considerations had little weight with the mass of statesmen 
and reformers a few years back. They shared General 
Braddock's belief in "manoeuvering large bodies." So- 
cialized action and corporate institutions were supposed to 
drift by some innate propulsion towards goodness. Let us 
think always in terms of the community and talk ever about 
the common welfare or the greatest good of the greatest 
number, and all things economic and political will be added 
unto us. The individual is the source of all evil, the com- 
munity of all virtue. When we have public control of in- 
dustry, of education, of hygiene, of morality, vice will dis- 
appear. Hardly, unless we go deep enough ; hardly, unless 
the individual is actually affected. But he is not affected by 
white-washing tactics. Character cannot be impressed from 
without. It must be fought for. To think that by changing 
the external form of society we inevitably better the within- 



116 THE IDEA OP PERSONALITY. 

ness of the society is the dream of hardy optimists who are 
not too much troubled by what Huxley called "ugly little 
facts." The mere socialization of individuals, whether by 
economic, political, or educational methods, may be as effec- 
tive in aggravating and enlarging the faults that we desire 
to eradicate. But the social process will drift in any direc- 
tion, according to the composition of the individuals that 
constitute the society. 

We have had some recent experiences that give practical 
importance to the foregoing reflections. The war accentu- 
ated in most minds the inefficiency and injustice, at a time of 
great public emergency, of free individual enterprise and of 
private property in the instruments of production. The ap- 
parent remedy was to socialize industry. Once accomp- 
lished, the thing had consequences outside the vision of even 
the executives who planned the change. The latter had 
merely constructed what they thought was a temporary ex- 
pedient. What they actually did was to afford to aspira- 
tions long dormant in society an opportunity for articulate 
expression. At least, this is the view of the situation taken 
by not a few writers. For instance, Mr. E. L. Duffus, on 
the editorial staff of the San Francisco "Bulletin," will 
say: "It is as though motives and principles on which 
civilization had unconsciously been acting for a long time 
had come to the surface. Necessity alone will not explain 
this acquiescence (of the masses in social readjustments) ; 
it has been too unquestioning, almost too cheerful. Neces- 
sity may be a compelling master, but without more prepara- 
tion than appears upon the records it would not have recon- 
ciled England and America to the current restrictions upon 
individual liberty, the current extension of the powers of 
government, the current substitution of the mechanical bias 
for the political and judicial bias, in short, to the current 
repeal of natural rights, if their civilization had actually 
rested upon the principles on which it was supposed to 
rest." 1 And we are further told that "the English are ob- 
viously preparing themselves to submit, after the war, to 
a great deal of government interference, of industrial and 

1 The New Republic, The Twilight of Natural Rights, March 2, 1918, p. 139. 



PERSONALITY IN ECONOMIC THEORY. 117 

commercial regimentation which they would not have toler- 
ated in the epoch that ended with the beginning of hostili- 
ties, because their individualism has become national 
through the war, and they are now willing, if necessary, to 
cooperate with their former competitors for the purpose of 
defeating a common competitor in foreign lands. ' " 

All this is not, of course, necessarily socialism; and it 
could have defects without compromising the claims of so- 
cialists, who do not believe that the present State can be im- 
partial, or that any set of beneficial circumstances can be 
patched on the old legal system. But the new arrangement 
is considered a step in the right direction. Mr. Sidney 
Webb, always interesting and suggestive, advises trade 
unionism that its chance lies in emphasizing the impossibil- 
ity of returning to the pre-war status and in seizing those 
elements in the existing situation which can be used for the 
furtherance of that industrial control which will ultimately 
mean the substitution of labor for capital as the source of 
political power. 2 What has been effected is, at a minimum, 
a beginning and a beginning that society has seemingly been 
craving. Such being the case, we might be led to expect, if 
not the full fruition of altruism, at least a decided improve- 
ment in the ethical background of economic life. All the 
more so, since the causes which produced industrial reforms 
during the war were accomplished by an intense communal 
consciousness and ostensibly under the guidance of the high- 
est kind of motives that could be derived from the general 
welfare, as that welfare was politically and economically 
conceived. But even the most sanguine are somewhat dis- 
appointed. Selfishness, rivalry, and the tendency to use 
strength against weakness are not less in evidence. It was 
but natural, perhaps, that capitalists, of the kind that fash- 
ioned the Balfour Report, for example, would seek ad- 
vantage in the new conditions. But labor has not been 
above reproach; and there may be as much desire to fore- 
stall objection as to round out a readable document, that the 

1 The Problems of Reconstruction, International and National, a pamphlet 

issued by the American Association for International Conciliation, New 
York, February, 1919, p. 234. 

2 The Restoration of Trade Union Conditions. New York, 1918. 



118 THE IDEA OE PEESONALITY. 

British Labor Party preaches the necessity of a conception 
"of the corporate duties of one nation to another; of the 
moral claims upon us of the non-adult races, and of our 
indebtedness to the world of which we are a part. ' ' 

Such reflections do not make us opposed to reform, 
they do not pretend to invalidate the reforms that are being 
tried. They are cynical enough, however, to prevent our 
idealism from running riot. They show what must be 
brought about before reforms become practically feasible. 
Neither mechanical laws nor biological development nor 
economic adjustment nor political expedients give any ab- 
solute assurance that the individual will measure up to the 
needs of the contemplated improvements. And unless he 
does, we have the faults of individualism synthesized and 
given wider scope for harm. This is the lesson of Presi- 
dent Wilson's warning: "Besponsible statesmen must now 
everywhere see, if they never saw before, that no peace can 
rest upon political or economic restrictions meant to benefit 
some nations and cripple or embarrass others, upon vindic- 
tive action of any sort or any kind of revenge or deliberate 
injury. ' n 

While Catholic economists do not trade on a collective 
reform that supposes an ideal individual, who may or may 
not exist as the individual himself decides, neither do they 
go back to the individual for the purpose of resting there. 
They have no wish to be butts for Carlyle's jibe about "but- 
toning your pockets and standing still." They aim at rein- 
tegrating the ethically revived individual in the socio-eco- 
nomic system in such a way that moral judgments which are 
"fairly efficacious" may be proposed. "When both have 
been realized in practice, the next step in the direction of 
wider distributive justice will be much clearer than it is 
today. ' ' 2 The most common method is to apply rules of jus- 
tice to whole categories of economic situations. There is a 
constant effort to distinguish as accurately as possible the 
personal, from the social, and still more from the physical, 
element. Thus, in the question of a living wage, it will be 

1 Reply to Pope Benedict XV, August 27, 1917. 

2 John A. Ryan, Distributive Justice, N. Y., 1916, p. 432. 



PERSONALITY IN ECONOMIC THEORY. 119 



pointed out that there is more than the purely economic re- 
lation of work to pay, that there is, in addition, a moral fac- 
tor, because ' ' the activity of the laborer is not a mere com- 
modity, as money or pork ; it is the output of a person, and a 
person who has no other means of realizing his inherent 
right to a livelihood. ' n We must not expect, naturally, the 
simplicity of socialistic measures. But neither must we 
charge indefiniteness and vague idealism. Moral considera- 
tions are an invaluable help in fixing the hidden causes of 
injustice, and in taking that wider view of social justice 
without which all discussion of higher wages and shorter 
hours is just a superficial scratching of the problem. 

Moreover, speculative enunciation is only a preliminary. 
There is some attempt to realize in practice the principles 
which it is believed that justice demands. Here, however, 
there is no concerted Catholic movement. Thinkers will ally 
themselves variously with available forces of economic 
piessure or of political assault upon the State. They may 
assist in spreading ideas of justice and, where they are pow- 
erful enough, in creating public opinion. We can presume 
that measures of land reform, that agitation for a minimum 
wage, for more equitable relations between employee and 
employer, for better working conditions, for increasing reg- 
ulation of woman and child labor, for social insurance, and 
the like, will meet with favorable consideration from Cath- 
olics* 2 

There is one Catholic who has, however, a specific and 
sweeping remedy that has its own interest in the present 
study. Mr. Hilaire Belloc has earned the profound grati- 
tude of every serious Catholic student by his proposal of 
peasant proprietorship. This is not said by way of apolo- 
getics, but because Mr. Belloc has shown the path to Cath- 
olics who would grasp the problems of economic life in some 
more definite and tangible manner. Even those who dis- 
agree with him will admit that he is an inspiration. By Dis- 



1 IK p. 371. 

* As illustrations of Catholic attitude on some of these questions, see Meth- 
1 As illustrations of Catholic attitude on some of these questions, see Meth- 
ods of Reforming Our Land System, by John A. Ryan, The Catholio 
World, October, 1912, and Minimum Wage Legislation by the same 
author in the same magazine for February, 1913. 



120 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY. 

tributivism Mr. Belloc means the assignment to every man, 
as far as possible, of individual private property. 1 While 
accepting the common Catholic view that private ownership 
is not directly necessary for any individual, he asserts it to 
be the historical means to human welfare. Private prop- 
erty is not intrinsically good, but neither is it intrinsically 
bad. "If you could get rid of the human institution of 
property, of the human instinct from which it arose, and of 
the human purposes which it serves, then you would as a 
necessary consequence develop (whether in a primitive or a 
complex condition of industry matters not at all) the 
scheme of production which the Socialists advocate. ' ' 2 "What 
is evil is that "the means of production are in very few 
hands, and are tending, under our system of morals, to get 
into fewer hands. ' ' 3 There is but one alternative and that a 
"society in which the means of production are severally 
possessed by a determinant number of the units, family and 
individual, that go to make up the State. 'Severally': that 
is, with a division between who owns and who does not own, 
lying between unit and unit, so that this family, that cor- 
poration, that individual, own lands and capital in absolute 
property as against others, and that the great mass ol regu- 
lations limiting such rights (for the furtherance of co-oper- 
ation, for the checking of competition, etc.) shall arise spon- 
taneously from below, and shall be the product of men eco- 
nomically free, acting in communion. ' Determinant ' : that 
is, a number which is not a bare majority, nor any fixed pro- 
portion, but such that it determines the general economic 
sense and opinion, character and air of society." 4 Mr. 
Belloc also offers measures by which a redistribution of 
property might be brought about. 5 Finally, while the core 
of his argument is individual property, he recognizes the 
need of cooperative association in order that property may 
be protected, and that the return of the Servile State may 
be prevented. He would find the means of protection in 

1 An article on Socialism and the Servile State and two articles on The Dis 
tributive State in the Cath. World, Apr. and Dec, 1917, and Jan., 1918 
* Socialism and the Servile State, Cath. World, April, 1917, p. 18. 
8 lb., p. 17. , 

4 The Distributive State, Catholic World, Dec., 1917, p. 305. 

5 76., January, 1918, pp. 472 fol. 



PERSONALITY IN ECONOMIC THEOEY. 121 



some such institution as that of the mediaeval guilds. 

To the student of personality Mr. Belloc's theory is 
suggestive, whether it be deemed wise or feasible in the 
last analysis. At any rate, it gives to personality a logical 
sequence, from independence of mind down to unrestricted 
possibilities for making a living. It is consonant with the 
dignity of the human person. Doubtless, the means of 
mental, moral, and spiritual development can be provided by 
wages. That is not the point. No one who remembers the 
unlimited potentialities of a person will be content with a 
minimum. Besides it is not merely a question of the in- 
dividual, as has been repeatedly urged, but of the society 
also, which is supposed to be the medium of the person's 
unfolding. And if the testimony of history and common 
sense count for anything, the existence of a "well-proper- 
tied society" gives greater assurance of creating an atmos- 
phere where the standard of living is better and higher, and 
where life is more wholesome and elevating. There is one 
thing else that, so far as is known, only genuine religion 
can teach and that is ' ' the elementary lesson that the path 
to achievements worth while leads through the field of hard 
and honest labor, not of lucky deals or gouging of the neigh- 
bor, and that the only life worth living is that in which one 's 
cherished wants are few, simple, and noble. ' n 

1 John A. Ryan, op. cit., p. 433. 



CONCLUSION. 

By way of conclusion it may be worth while to sum- 
marize and unify the various steps in the study just ended. 

In the first place, the history of the conception of per- 
sonality, human and Divine, shows a distinctive contribu- 
tion to the subject by Christian thinkers, which represents a 
development of thought that cannot be forced out of recog- 
nition without landing us anew in the pagan conception of 
the State, overthrown by Christianity. The long and 
stormy inquiries into the meaning of personality served to 
teach mankind the spiritual dignity and moral grandeur of 
man, made to the image and likeness of God. They helped 
to keep him from being the mere fraction in the unit of the 
State, which he was under paganism. They showed that 
man was definable vertically in relation to God, no less than 
horizontally in relation to his fellowmen in society. They 
showed him to be the subject of natural rights not capable 
of invasion by the State, except at the State's eventual cost. 
And this exploration of man's individuality, substantiality, 
and inviolability of person is one of the heirlooms of Chris- 
tian thinking with which the world cannot afford to part. 
One has but to study the present tendency to transfer in- 
dividuality and personality from the individual to the State, 
to realize that social thought, in its philosophical founda- 
tions, is not now advancing but going back. The penalty of 
forsaking belief in the personality of man and God is an 
impersonal, dehumanizing Absolute destined to crush, not 
to conserve and elevate humanity. 

The aim of all Scholastics, mediaeval and modern, has 
been to keep the Christian victory from being exchanged for 
terms of lesser worth. Substance, nature, essence, sub- 
sistence, personality are thus more than simple logical expe- 
dients. If we see in Scholastic philosophy nothing but clever 
distinction, we have not yet begun to understand it. When 
the Schoolmen rooted personality and personal identity in 
substance, they had in their mind's eye a perspective of 



124 THE IDEA OF PEESONALITY. 



spiritual, ethical, and political consequences. And beneath 
a definition of personality given, for example, by Aquinas 
there are depths of moral implication and the fulness of a 
rich and varied reality. St. Thomas faced the problem of 
human personality in society with far more candor and 
vigor than his modern critics have ever detected in his 
writings. His chief glory is that he sacrificed no element in 
that problem. He would have no jejune simplification ; no 
identification of personality with egotism or uncontrolled 
individualism, which might apparently save the human soul, 
but at the risk of anarchy; no extension of the social pro- 
cess in order to conceive society as a substitute for indi- 
vidual effort and responsibility, by making it use personal 
minds and wills for superior purposes of its own. Those 
who urge that the Scholastic notion of personality is un- 
avoidably unsocial forget that the great Scholastics were 
disciples of Aristotle, further than which no apology is 
needed for their social beliefs. Those who say, in addition, 
that the concept of personality is a defense of selfishness 
have overlooked the fact that the same Scholastics were 
Christians, whose creed has always held that individual sal- 
vation is worked out in company with one's neighbors, be- 
cause the second of the great commandments is "like unto 
the first." Nor should we ignore the historical circum- 
stance that side by side with the ideas that produced the 
brilliantly developed notion of personality in the Middle 
Ages there went a spirit of true communism. 

The trouble is that modern philosophers, in attacking 
the traditional concept of personality, have in view some 
ghost or shadow which, whatever it is, is surely not Scholas- 
ticism. Who ever said that society and the individual were 
antithetical? Who ever denied that human personality is 
perfected in society? Who ever held that society and the 
State were impliedly enemies of liberty? We might per- 
haps find such suggestions in the ^Reformation doctrine of 
private judgment, in the dilettante individualism of the 
"Renaissance, in the subjectivist philosophies of Kant and 
his followers. But the Scholastics contain no such hints. 
A candidate for the mediaeval universities would probably 
learn from the lectures on his first day of attendance that 



CONCLUSION. 125 



individual and group were cooperators, even if he had not 
already deduced this principle from the activity of his par- 
ish or commune, from the workings of the guilds, from the 
dreams of spiritual empire with which the contemporary at- 
mosphere was full. The notion of man as a social animal 
became too obvious to be glorified. 

The real problem for the Scholastics was to discover 
what elements of human nature must be satisfied before 
personality is provided with the means of its expression. 
This was a problem which taxed their ingenuity. They had 
to make allowance for continuous growth, for changing en- 
vironments, for all the vast complexity in persons. But 
they furnished some principles of lasting merit. They em- 
phasized the fact that each man lives not a multiple, but a 
single life, that no good can come of breaking up person- 
ality into its component parts. Any influence of religion, 
business, philosophy, politics, domestic life affects the man 
as a whole. This coherent unity was designated a sub- 
stance, the very idea of which excluded any description of 
personality in the mere terms of a " process," a " function, ' ' 
a l i series "ora" stream ' ' of functions or processes. Kealiz- 
ing, also, that any effective development of personality must 
proceed in the direction of greater unfolding of the rational 
nature, they proposed searching analyses of the mind and 
the will, both in themselves and in relation to the sensitive, 
emotional, and organic aspects of life. From this scheme 
they deduced a definite program of character building and 
education. Finally, to challenge personal attainment, the 
Scholastics offered motives from religion and morality. 
They did not minimize the political, economic, scientific, 
aesthetic, or other functions of man. But they sought to 
awaken men's minds and to stimulate their wills. When 
this had been achieved, progress in other fields would fol- 
low. Certainly the work of the monastic orders, the guilds, 
even with all their shortcomings, the political theories that 
took liberty for their foundation, the extensive missionary 
movements, the orders of knighthood, the Crusades, the 
artistic achievements are proofs that the Schoolmen were in 
principle correct to an astonishing degree. But what is per- 
haps most instructive is the necessity— inculcated by the be- 



126 THE IDEA OF PEESONALITY. 

lief in personality — of taking into accont the very lowest 
strata of society. True, much of what was seen to be good 
had yet to be brought down to practice. The condition of 
the peasants was deplorable. But the principle of emanci- 
pation had been proclaimed, and some measure of its appli- 
cation realized. Monasticism and feudalism, resting on 
principles of real worth, and demanding only that individ- 
uals prove themselves, were agencies by which any man 
might rise to the level of his ablity. 

Has the philosophy of such a plan of life anything to 
teach the present age? Most assuredly. All the more so, 
since democracy is preached as the panacea for all our ills. 
Democracy is denned as "the definite rise of the average 
man as an important factor in civilization. ' ' Evidently de- 
mocracy is not an affair of votes, or charters, or of reforms 
by which the masses are presumably swept into happiness 
and prosperity. It is a spiritual force, intelligible only in 
terms of individual effort, individual betterment, individual 
desire, and individual achievement. It is not intended to 
equalize men but to equalize opportunity. If men are to 
be in a position to utilize opportunities they must first learn 
to appreciate themselves and their possibilities. Contrary 
to the general belief, democracy has not triumphed. It is 
in the making, for good or bad, as each man himself shall 
decide. No government regulation, no social organism can 
bring about a condition that depends essentially for its 
realization on the responsibility that individuals shall bring 
to their social activities. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
i. 

Personality in General. 

Billott, Cardinal. De Deo Uno et Trino, 5th. edition, 1910. 

Boethius. Liber de Persona et Duatras Naturis ; P. L., 64. 

Cajetan, T. Commentarium in Summam. 

Coffey, P. Ontology or the Theory of Being, London, 1914. 

Duns Scotus, John. In Lib. Sententiarum, Complete Works, Vol. VII, 

Paris, 1891. 
Franzelin, J. B. De Verbo Incarnato, Rome, 1874. 
Illingworth, J. R. Personality, Human and Divine, London, 1899. 
Mercier, D. Ontologie, Vol. II of the Cours de Philosophie, Paris and 

Louvain, 1910. 
Rickaby, J. General Metaphysics, New York, 1890. 
Suarez, F. De Incarnatione, Complete Works, Berton edition, Vol. XVII, 

Paris, 1859. 

De Trinitate, lb., Vol. I. 

S. Thomas. Summa Theologica, Rome, 1894. 



II. 

Divine Personality. 

Ambrose. De Virginibus ; P. L., 16. 

De Spiritu Sancto; P. L., 17. 

Augustine. De Trinitate; P. L., 42. 

Letter to Evodius ; P. L., 33. 

Athanasius. De Decretis; P. G., 25. 

Discourses against the Arians; P. G., 26. 

Letter to Serapiob ; P. G., 26. 

Epist. ad Afros ; P. G., 26. 

Basil. De Spiritu Sancto; P. G., 32. 

• Letters 38, 125. 236 ; P. G.. 32. 

— — Homilies, 15 ; P. G., 31. 

Adv. Eunomium; P. G., 29. 

Gregory Nazianzen. Orations 20, 21, 23, 25; P. G„ 35. 

29, 31, 33, 42 ; P. G., 36. 

Gregory of Nyssa. Quod non sint tres Dii; P. G., 45. 
Hilary. De Trinitate; P. L., 10. 

—- De Synodis; P. L., 10. 

Jerome. Letter 15; Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Schaff-Waas edition, 

Vol. VI, New York, 1893. 
Leontius of Byzantium. Discourse against Nestorius and Eutyches; 

P. G., 86. 
Origen. Commentary on John (Book II) ; P. G., 14. 
Phebadius of Agen. De Filii Divinitate; P. L., 20. 
Rufinus. Historia Ecclesiastica ; P. L., 21. 
Victorinus. De Generatione Verbi ; P. L., 8. 
Victorinus. Treatise against Arius; P. L., 8. 
Tertullian. Treatise against Praxeas ; P. L., 2. 
Lebreton, Jules. Les origines du dogme de la Trinite, Paris, 1910. 
De Regnon, Th. La Sainte Trinite, 4 Vols., Paris, 1898. 
Newman, John Henry. Arians of the Fourth Century, New York, 1891. 



128 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



III. 
Human Personality. 

Angell, James Rowland. Psychology, 4th. edition, New York, 1908. 

Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution, New York, 1911. 

Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, 2nd. edition, Philadelphia. 

Dubray, Charles A. Introductory Philosophy, New York, 1916. 

Hume, David. Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. H. Selby-Bigge, 
Oxford, 1896. 

James, William. Psychology, 2 Vols., New York, 1890. 

— The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philos- 
ophy, New York, 1911. 

Jordan, David Starr. Foot Notes to Evolution, New York, 1898. 

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, Eng. Tr. by J. M. D. Meikle- 
john, London, 1887. 

Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding, edition of 
A. C. Fraser, Oxford, 1894. 

Maher, Michael. Psychology, New York. 

Mill, John Stuart. An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, 
London, 1865. 

System of Logic, London, 1891. 

Mivart, St. George. The Origin of Human Reason, London, 1889. 

Piat, Clodius. La personne humaine, Paris, 1897. 

Ribot, Theodule Armand. Diseases of Personality, Chicago, 1894. 

Thorndike, Edward L. Individuality. 

: The Original Nature of Man, New York, 1913. 

Todd, Arthur James. Theories of Social Progress, Pt. I, cc. I-V, New 
York, 1918. 

Windle, Bertram C. A. What is Life? A Study of Vitalism and Neo- 
Vitalism, St. Louis, 1908. 

. ... IV. 

Aspects of Personality. 

A. Physiological : — 

Binet, Alfred. The Psychic Life of Micro-organisms, Chicago, 1889. 

Romanes, George John. Animal Intelligence, New York, 1883. 

Tigerstedt, Robert. Lehrbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, Leipzig, 1909. 

B. Ethical : 

Cronin, Michael. The Science of Ethics, 2 Vols., New York, 1909. 

Eucken, Rudolf. The Problem of Human Life, New York, 1910. 

Fouillee, Alfred. Les elements sociologiques de la morale, Paris, 1905. 

Green, Thomas H. Prolegomena to Ethics, Oxford, 1889. 

Holt, E. B. The Freudian Wish and its Relation to Ethics, New York, 1915. 

Keatinge, M. W. Suggestion in Education, New York, 1907. 

Lecky, William E. H. History of European Morals, 2 Vols., New York, 1869. 

Sutherland, A. The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct, 2 Vols., New 

York, 1898. 
Wallace, William. Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics, 

Caird edition, Oxford, 1898. 

C. Social : 

Boas, Franz. The Mind of Primitive Man, New York, 1911. 

Cooley, C. H. Human Nature and the Social Order, New York, 1902. 

Durkheim, Emile. De la division du travail social, Paris, 1893. 

Les regies de la methode sociologique, Paris, 1895. 

Giddings, Franklin H. The Principles of Sociology, New York, 1908. 
Kropotkin, P. A. Mutual Aid : A Factor in Evolution, New York, 1902. 



BIBLIOGKAPHY. 129 



Le Bon, Gustave. Psychologie des foules, Paris, 1895. 

Lewes, George Henry. Problems of Life and Mind, 5 Vols., Boston, 1880. 

McDougall, W. Social Psychology, New York, 1908. 

Tarde, Gabriel. Les lois de l'imitation, Paris, 1890. 

Les lois sociales, Paris, 1898. 

D. Political : 
Aristotle. The Politics. 

Acton, Lord. History of Freedom and Other Essays, edited by J. N. Figgis 
and R. V. Laurence, London, 1909. 

Barker, Ernest. Political Thought from Spencer to Today, Home Univer- 
sity Library. 

Bellarmine, Robert. De Laicis, Complete Works, Vol. II, Naples, 1857. 

Bentham, Jeremy. Fragment on Government, Oxford, 1891. 

Laski, J. H. Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, New Haven, Yale 
University Press, 1917. 

Leo XIII. The Christian Constitution of States, reprinted in the Pope 
and the People, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1903. 

Newman, John Henry. Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, in Difficulties of 
Anglicans, Vol. II, London, 1891. 

Spencer, Herbert. The Man Versus the State, London, 1885. 

Social Statics, London, 1850. 

Suarez, F. Defensio Fidei Catholicae, Complete Works, Berton edition, 
Paris, 1859, Vol. XXIV. 

E. Economic : 

Cole, G. D. H. Self-Government in Industry, London, 1918. 

Orage, A. National Guilds, New York, 1914. 

Ryan, John A. Distributive Justice, New York, 1916. 

Seager, Henry Rogers. Principles of Economics, 2nd ed., New York. 

Wallas, Graham. The Great Society, New York, 1914. 

Webb, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney. Industrial Democracy, New York, 1902. 

History of Trades Unionism, New York, 1911. 

Restoration of Trade Union Conditions, New 

York, 1918. 



Articles. 

Belloe, Hilaire. Socialism and the Servile State, The Catholic World, 

April, 1917. 
The Distributive State, The Catholic World, December, 

1917, and January, 1918. 
Folsom, Joseph K. The Social Psychology of Morality and Its Bearing on 

Moral Education, The American Journal of Sociology, January, 1918. 
Hall, G. Stanley. Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self, American 

Journal of Psychology, IX, 351-382. 
Pound, Roscoe. The Interests of Personality, Harvard Law Review, 

XXVIII, Nos, 4-5. 
Thompson, J. Arthur. Is There One Nature? Hibbert Journal, October, 

1911 ; January, 1912. 
Shanahan, Edmund T. The Unconsidered Remainder, Catholic World, 

February, 1914. 
The Meaning of God in Human Experience, Cath- 
olic World, October, 1913. 

Evolution and Progress, Catholic World, Vol. 101, 



in three articles, beginning pp. 145, 289, 447. 
Ward, James. Personality, the Final Aim of Social Eugenics, Hibbert 
Journal, July, 1917. 



DEUS LUX MEA 



THESES 



QUAS, 



AD DOCTORATUM 



IN 



SACRA THEOLOGIA 



Apnd Universitatem Gatbolica Americaa 



CONSEQUENDUM 



PUBLICE PROPUGNABIT 



Timothbus Bartholomaeus Moroney, S. T. L. 



HORA IX A. M. DIE VI IUNII A. D. MOMXIX. 



Univbrsitas Catholica Americae 



Washingtonii, D. C. 



S. Facultas Theologica 



1918-1919 
No. 13 



THESES 



THESES. 135 



I. 



Falsum est " nihil realiter cognosci posse a fluxu ex- 
periential distinctum." 

II. 

Continuas, licet distinctas, esse relationes inter fidem et 
rationem, gratiam et naturam vigentes, cum Sancto Thoma 
affirmamus. 

III. 

"Ac prinmm quidem Deum, rerum omnium principium 
et finem, naturali rationis lumine per ea quae facta sunt, 
hoc est per visibilia creationis opera, tanquam causam per 
effectus, certo cognosci, adeoque demonstrari etiam posse, 
profiteor. ' n 

IV. 

Ea quae nuperrime urgent modernistae contra argu- 
mentum Sancti Thomae e motu desnmptum procedunt vel 
ex ignoratione elenchi, vel ex placitis gratuitis evolutionis 
monisticae quam iidem profitentur. 

V. 

Negatur theoria progressionis inconsciae, huic adspect. 
abili mundo applicatae. 

VI. 

Communem conceptum Dei omnium inesse mentibus, pa^ 
ganorum scilicet atque christianorum, non solum Scripturae, 
sed et etiam Patrum testimonia necnon nuperrima relig- 
religionum historia luce clarius ostendunt. 

VII. 

Hunc historicum Dei conceptum omnium mentibus in- 
situm seposuit Cartesius quum essentiam religionis in idea 
ionum historia luce clarius ostendunt. 
tionem pro nihilo habuerit. 

1 Acta S. Sedis, 9 Sept., 1910. 



136 THESES. 



VIII. 



Eecte non sentiunt ii qui in notione personalitatis sen- 
sim sine sensu semovenda, profectum religionis historicae 
reponendum esse putent. 

IX. 

Non in admittenda personalitate in divinis, sed in hac 
notione minus recte intelligenda, erraverunt primitivi. 

X. 

Ob id quod philosophi et dramatistae Graeci veram 
personalitatis notionem prae ocuiis non habuerint, non est 
mirum quod in divinis quidem pantheismus, in humanis 
vero Status omnipotentia, exinde excreverint. 

XI. 

Etsi Patres Apostolici vocibus naturae et personae, 
ex quibus terminologia trinitaria desumpta fuit, usi non 
tfuerint, minime exinde sequitur sensum hisee verbis postea 
expressum ipsos latuisse. 

XII. 

Personae Christi exploratio, personae humane in- 
dagationem uberiorem, ut litteris christianis constat, in- 
duxit. 

XIII. 

Persona obiective sumpta est natura rationalis incom- 
municabiliter subsistens. 

XIV. 

Huic non obstant veritati, facta ex hypnotismo aliisque 
eiusdem generis phaenomenis nuperrime in medium allata. 



THESES. 137 



XV. 



Mysterium SS. Trinitatis solius rationis ope, sive se- 
clusa sive supposita revelatione, positive demonstrari ne- 
quit; qui vero suppositae per Mem veritatis rationes in- 
vestigate multipliciter quidem proncit. 

XVI. 

Consideratis dogmatum catholicorum origine, natura, 
atque profectu, ab iis omnino recedimus qui haec dogmata 
exhibere conantur ac si specimina praeberent quibus ap- 
plicari possent leges generales evolutionis biologieae. 

XVII. 

Principium quod asserit naturam esse uniformem, nee 
in divinis nee in humanis libertatem destruit. 

XVIII. 

Progressus scientiarum non postulat, ut reformentur 
conceptus doctrinae christianae de Deo, de homine, et de 
relatione inter Deum et hominem. 

XIX. 

Obstat conscientia, ut regula morum, ne potestas sta- 
tus civilis ultra debitos limites protrahatur. 

XX. 

Ex individualismo turn religioso, turn politico non 
pauca secuta sunt mala. 

XXI. 

Doctrina Eedemptionis, pulcherrima synthesi a Sancto 
Doctore expressa, summe spiritualis et moralis est dicenda, 
ab omni insuper aequivalentia quantitativa inter peccati 
gravitatem et passionem Domini stabilienda independens. 



138 THESES. 



XXII. 



Non in unanimitate explicationum, sed potius in con- 
tinua attestationum catena, consistit traditio catholica: ac 
proinde a veritate aberrant ii qui dogmata catholica ab 
explocationibus theologicis eorumdum non sednlo dis- 
creverint. 

XXIII. 

Theologice, historjce, et critice inspecta, ostenditur 
falsa distinctio ilia nuperrime adinventa inter Christum 
quern exhibet historia et Christum quern accipit fides. 

XXIV. 

Nequit citari doctrina de Immaculata Conceptione 
Beatissimae Virginis Mariae ac si exemplum praeberet 
conclusionis theologicae sensim sine sensu ad dogma reve- 
latum evectae. 

XXV. 

Ex theoriis quae finem individuorum hominum in 
utilitate communitatis sive praesenti sive futura reponunt, 
sequitur personalitatis humanae destructio, necnon 
iniuriosa ilia Status omnipotentia, quam hoderni politici 
haud quidem pauci adstruere atque inducere nituntur. 

XXVI. 

Religion, though often imperfectly conceived, is in 
normal conditions of human existence the inevitable out- 
come of the use of reason, that is, it is the result of the 
application of the principle of causality. 

XXVII. 

The Animist theory for the origin of religion does 
not seem to be psychologically probable, or historically 
verifiable. 



THESES. 139 



xxvin. 



In the legitimate cravings of the human heart for 
communication w^th God, the theist may find a strong 
presumptive argument in favor of divine revelation. 

XXIX. 

The criticism of many contemporary critics, that the 
moral codes of organized religion cannot satisfy modern 
needs may be traced to misconceptions both of religion and 
morality. 



The Christian idea of immortality cannot be proved 
to have been borrowed from Mithraism. 

XXXI. 

The rapid spread of Christianity was due rather to 
the inherent appeal of Christian doctrine and morality 
than to any supposed satisfaction of contemporary revo- 
lutionary aspirations. 

XXXII. 

The hierarchical constitution of the Church was not a 
mere expedient, foreign to the mind of Christ, and evolved 
to meet social disorders in the Church. 

XXXIII. 

While historical necessity apparently forces us to con- 
clude that in the beginning "episcopus" and "presbyter" 
were used synonymously, we do not have to infer that the 
offices which these words have long signified were also re- 
garded as identical. 

XXXIV. 

The claim of the Bishops of Rome to be the successors 
of St. Peter, far from being disputed, was recognized by 
the Church from the earliest times. 



140 THESES. 



XXXV. 



Christ intended the Church to be one in space and in 
time, that ,is, the Church should have the qualities of 
catholicity and apostolicity. 

XXXVI. 

A study of the Prophet Osee does not favor the view 
that the ethical monotheism of the eighth century was a 
recent introduction. 

XXXVII. 

Neither the character of the author, nor the features 
of style and composition prevent our accepting the Proph- 
esy of Amos as a historical account. 

XXXVIII. 

The problem of Immanuel in Isaias vii.-viii. cannot be 
solved by a text-critical study of these chapters alone. 

XXXIX. 

The critical evidence that we have is not such as to 
justify the assertion that St. Matthew is not the author of 
the First Gospel. 

XL. 

The Neo-Protestant doctrine which admits in Christ's 
death nothing more than the moral value of an example is 
opposed to S. Paul's idea of the Atonement as an objec- 
tively efficacious Sacrifice. 

XLI. 

The Catholic doctrine does not conceive natural rights 
as rights which isolated men possessed in a hypothetical 
and pre-social state of nature, but as rights innate in the 
constitution of man, and existing for his welfare. 



THESES. 141 



XLIL 



Although natural rights are all equally valid, they dif- 
fer in regard to their basis, and their urgency and im- 
portance. 

XLIIL 

Private landownership is a natural right because in 
present conditions the institution is necessary for individual 
and social welfare. 

XLIV. 

The modern tendency, observable in much of political 
and juristic theory, to regard the sovereignty of the State 
as extending to every kind of act rests on an unwarranted 
assumption of the moral pre-eminence of the State. 

XLV. 

The facts of psychology and probable difficulties of 
administration unite to make the realization of the Socialist 
scheme of industry undesirable. 

XLVI. 

Doctrina de Sacramentis in genere nonnisi post multa 
saecula scientifice per analysim et synthesim expolita est. 

XLVII. 

Merito damnata fuit a Pio X., in decreto Lamentabili 1 , 
propositio xl, qua asseritur quod "Sacramenta ortum 
habuerunt ex eo, quod Apostoli eorumque successores ideam 
aliquam et intentionem Christi, suadentibus et moventibus 
circumstantiis et eventibus, interpretati sunt". 

*Acta S. Sedis, 3 Iulii, 1907. " " ' 



142 THESES. 



XLVIII. 



Certum est, tempore quo Novatores prodierunt, dogma 
de septem sacramentorum existentia, in universa Ecclesia, 
sive Bomana, sive Graeca, per plura saecula iam creditum 
fuisse; atqui ilia fides universalis explicari nequit nisi a 
traditione apostolica oriatur. 

XLIX. 

Quod Christus promiserat in capite sexto Ioannis, id 
fideliter praestitit in ultima coena. 

L. 

Missa est verum et proprie dictum sacrificium Novae 
Legis. 

LI. 

Matrimonii finis primarius est procreatio atque edu- 
catio prolis ; secundarius mutuum adiutorium et remedium 
concupiscentiae. (Canon 1013,1.) 

» LII. 

Essentiales matrimonii proprietates sunt unitas ac 
indissolubilitas, quae in matrimonio christiano peculiarem 
obtjnent firmitatem ratione sacramenti. (Canon 1013,2.) 

LIE. 

Matrimonii promissio sive unilateralis, sive bilateralis 
seu sponsalitia, irrita est pro utroque f oro, nisi facta fuerit 
per scripturam subsignatam a partibus et vel a parocho 
aut loci Ordinario, vel a duobus saltern testibus. (Canon 
1017,1.) 

LIV. 

In mortis periculo validum et licitum est matrimonium 
contractum coram soHs testibus; et etiam extra mortis 
periculum dummodo prudenter praevideatur earn rerum 
conditionem esse per mensem duraturam. (Canon 1098,1.) 



VITA. 

Natus sum anno 1889 Philadelphiae. Litte- 
rarum elementis in scholis paroecialibus Neo- 
Eboriensis imbutisi, in Studiis apnd scholam 
Societatis Sancti Ioseph praeparatoriam in- 
cubui. Seminarium Baltimorense, in tutelam 
Beatae Mariae Virginis commissum, frequen- 
tavi nt disciplinis theologicis operam darem; 
ibidem anno 1915 ad Sacrae Theologiae Bacca- 
lanreatum sum provectus. Postremo in civium 
huius almae Universitatis numerum anno 1915 
ad scrip tus sum, ubi Dr. Shanahan auspiciis 
theologiae dogmaticae praecipue studiis incubui. 
Theologiae insuper fundamentalis et sacramen- 
talis disciplinis deditus fui, quarum illam Dr. 
Aiken hanc Dr. Kennedy me docuit. 

His, quos commemoravi, et aliis de me 
egregie meritis viris doctis, qui summa doctrina 
atque benevolentia me semper iuverunt, gratias 
et nunc ago et semper habebo quam possum 
maximas. 



THESES. 143 



LV. 



Impedimentum affinitatis oritur ex matrimonio valido 
sive rato tantum sive rato et consummate. (Canon 97,1.) 

LVI. 

Even though the Christian Religion was primarily 
preached as a plan of personal salvation, it cannot be said 
that Christianity has contributed nothing towards social 
progress. 

Lvn. 

The Church as conceived by Clement of Alexandria is 
a hierarchical institution. 

LVIIL 

There is in the writings of St. Cyprian a theory of ec- 
clesiastical unity under the headship of the Bishop of Rome. 

LIX. 

The view which supposes that prior to the Civil War 
most of the negroes in the South were Catholic, and that 
they fell away only through neglect, is erroneous. 

LX. 

All things considered, the Catholic Church has made 
during the past twenty years convincing progress among 
the negroes. 



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